Look up “basically” in the dictionary or thesaurus, and you’re likely to find synonyms such as “fundamentally,” “essentially,” “intrinsically,” or even “radically.” Dig down further, and you might find “at heart” or “at bottom,” “for the most part” or “in the main.” These last ones begin to suggest something that translating the word in context makes especially clear. Basically sometimes doesn’t mean basically at all.
Consider the phrase, “This peach is basically good.” What does it mean in context? Let’s say someone’s sitting at the dinner table, tasting a piece of fruit that was just brought home from the supermarket. It’s a little on the green side. They picked it early to avoid bruising during shipment. It doesn’t have enough sugar. It’s a little hard. The basically in this case could mean something very close to “not very” or even “not.”
“So you’re basically telling me,” responds the partner, “I should have gone to the farmer’s market instead.” Here the basically has lost almost all denotative quality. It has become a marker for something else. Displeasure perhaps. Maybe it’s part of a question formation that doesn’t have any questioning intonation, suggesting something like tentativeness, inviting the interlocutor to object, “No, no, that’s not what I meant at all!” Maybe it’s the prelude to an argument. Or the continuation of one.
Imagine, for example, that the person who tasted the peach just returned from a long absence abroad and, upon arriving home, asked, “Did you miss me?” To which the partner (the one who purchased the basically good peach) responded: “Basically.”
Now that basically is filled with the kind of liminal uncertainty that translation thrives on.
###
Russell Scott Valentino 