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It's been bugging me for a while. When a person (often a US American) says or writes "blah blah blah is by far blah blah". As I understand the phrase originally meant "by a large margin". I.e. when one says "the Galapagos giant tortoise is by far the largest tortoise in the world", it means "this tortoise's size exceeds the other tortoises' by a large margin".
So, when people say it, do they actually mean "X is by a large extent Y"? I don't think so, honestly. It almost feels like it's thrown in for good measure, without having any real meaning, except to give more weight to any sentence. Maybe I'm misunderstanding it?
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