Last week, my academic-writing students and I discussed a student's sentence about Franca in N. K. Jemisin's short story "L'Alchimista": "The catholic metaphor of purgatory suggests that she is in a temporary state of suffering, rather than eternal damnation." I asked the students to drop "suggests that" and revise the sentence without it. One student replacedit: "The catholic metaphor of purgatory places her in a temporary state of suffering, rather than eternal damnation."When I asked him whether "places" is stronger than "suggests that", he said that "suggests that" is "wishy-washy" while "places" is "substantial" and makes a stronger claim. From now on, I will call such "scaffolding" constructions "wishy-washy". (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 8 December 2025)