For a 2000 paper titled “Actually and other markers of an apparent discrepancy between propositional attitudes of conversational partners,” linguists Sara Smith and Andreas Jucker studied the conversational use of the word actually among friends and strangers at the University of California Long Beach. The researchers wanted to better understand "discourse markers": Words or phrases that help organize our speech and writing, but which aren't essential to a sentence's meaning.

Examples of discourse markers include well, nonetheless, like, basically, I mean, okay. But Smith and Jucker were primarily interested in actually, and in ten hours of recorded conversations among students they counted 78 uses of the word as a discourse marker. Smith, a professor of linguistics at UCLB, said she and her colleague presumed actually would be used to disprove facts, but instead the speakers most often used the word to discount attitudes or opinions.

“We found that in many cases the claims with which the partner disagreed had never been stated or even clearly implied,” Smith told me in an email. “Rather the partner was drawing an inference based on subtle cues or social norms about what the partner would believe was then signaling a disagreement with that.” Actually, when used as discourse marker (and often as a proposition, i.e. “I actually think we should order pizza instead."), has come to signal a difference of opinion, not facts.

Whereas basically and well are relatively harmless tics that crowd our sentences, actually has an attitude. Consider this recent headline from Business Insider: "Women in Tech Actually Don’t Get Paid Less Than Men." Or Maureen Dowd's defense of Barack Obama after Sarah Palin accused him of “wearing mom jeans”: “Actually, the jeans the president wore in the Oval Office, talking to Putin on the phone last weekend, looked good.”

Especially on the Internet, a platform where everyone is trying to stake an intellectual claim in comments sections or on Twitter, actually often expresses a very specific attitude: condescension. Salon contributor Roxane Gay, a writing professor at Eastern Illinois University, told me in an email, “When people use the word actually in many contexts, they are implying that they have exclusive access to a font of incontrovertible knowledge. When they actually you, they are offering you a gift.”