The Obnoxiousness of Sentences Beginning with "Actually"

Sentences that began with the word "actually," or some variation on it (like "Well, actually") tend to be presented as corrections to an error of fact or reasoning someone (allegedly) made.

It is not pleasant to be "actuallyed." Disagreement in itself is unpleasant--unavoidably a display of disrespect (however much we engage in the hypocrisy of speaking of "respectful disagreement.") The disagreement and disrespect are more blatant still when someone corrects someone else--implicitly making themselves a superior to an inferior.

Is this sufficient reason to refrain from expressing disagreement, or from correcting? Of course not. Yet it gives us the more reason to be sure that when we correct someone else we ourselves are right, and they are wrong.

My experience is that few of those who rush to "correct" others bother to be so sure--either of the facts, or of what the person they mean to correct has said. Mostly they want to indulge their prejudices. And indulge, too, that part of them deriving satisfaction from taking someone else down a peg. And so in "correcting" something that may never have been wrong to begin with, that may have been entirely correct while they are completely incorrect, they bring out that "Actually" with great self-satisfaction.

Idiots that they are, they make it all the harder for those who would say "Actually" where it is really warranted and needed.