Who first said "that said"?

"That said."  It's the "is, is" of our day.  Meaningless sentence filler used to puff up the presumptive gravitas of the speaker.  They all do it, unthinkingly, and that's the problem.  Unthinkingness of the opinionati herd. We just did a google search of  "that said safire" as a test, and it appears the great word hound is not yet on the scent.  We're gonna pen (email) him a note to ask what gives. Who said it first, and why is it such a hit? For us it's a real gagger. So-called wordsmiths mouthing meaningless memes to mark their membership in the MSM. Here's the first link that comes up when you do a straight "that said" google search:

Churchill said he quoted one e-mail that said American Indians should have been exterminated instead of Jews and another that said Churchill's grandparents should have been sterilized. He said American Thinker writers misquoted him.

Pretty cool.  Here's another fascinating google-search snippet out of context:

That said, the movie takes what amounts to a daring position in today's ideological climate, endorsing institutions like the UN as valuable tools for bringing order to our chronically unruly world. All of which makes "The Interpreter" engrossing to watch and stimulating to think about.

Then there's this, again, wildly out of context, about the late Edward Said:

Hitchens stated that Said denied any possibility "that direct Western engagement in the region is legitimate" and that Said's analysis cast "every instance of European curiosity about the East [as] part of a grand design to exploit and remake what Westerners saw as a passive, rich, but ultimately contemptible 'Oriental' sphere."

One could create an entire blog around a google search for "that said."  The blog title?  How about That's Ed"?

Update:  Our poet laureate, Jeff Hull, blesses us with a poem composed for the occasion:

To use too many words
To say what's plain is bad;
But then, t'was ever thus—
And that said . . . ever sad.

From lemons, lemonade.  That said, thanks so much, Dr. Hull.

Comments

[Jeff Hull]

To use too many words
To say what's plain is bad;
But then, t'was ever thus—
And that said ... ever sad.