I was listening to The Salmon of Doubt, the posthumously published book with material collected from the computer used by Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams: what a brilliant, witty and fabulously engaging man!
His sharp and hilarious analysis of the phrase "it turns out" is a great Adamsian moment:
"..am I alone in finding the expression 'it turns out' to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors 'I read somewhere that...' or the craven 'they say that...' because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it's research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight."
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