Use of "way back"

[Menie]

I often see the phrase "Way back in 19xx..."  and I cringe because I think the writer should have just said "In 19xx..."  For me, a person who uses "way back" in this manner sounds verbose.  And, for some reason, I always associate this term with people who were one generation older than me, those who grew up and were educated during the American time. 

The following sentence from Rotting fish due to fish-kills: another food for thought By Dr. Flor Lacanilao is what set me thinking about this:

"Way back in 1961-1964, when there were no fishpens in the Lake, the annual catch of small fishers there was 80,000-82,000 tons."

Does the use of "way back" here give any added value, or should the writer have said "From 1961 to 1964, when there were..."? 

[Joe Carillo]

The idiomatic expression “from way back” means “from far in the past” or “from a much earlier time.” It’s a rhetorical device to convey a long sweep of time between the present and some point in the past—a sense that may not come through as clearly if the writer or speaker simply used a particular date or numeric time frame. Figurative expressions like “from way back” certainly gives added value to exposition—I’d call it flavor—by counteracting the numerical blandness and tedium of matter-of-fact phrasing like “From 1961 to 1964…”

I don’t think it’s verbose to use “from way back” in exposition, but I agree with you that this expression does associate its users with people older than the reader or listener. Its users may not necessarily be people “who grew up and were educated during the American time”—any time frame for their growing up and education actually will apply to that usage—but by using that expression, they are often deliberately but subtly asserting their primacy over their reader or listener by virtue of their being older. That, to me, is a semantic bonus that goes with the use of “from way back” in personal narratives instead of just plain numeric chronology.

[Menie]

Hi, Joe,

I agree with you that using "way back" does add flavor to an exposition.  I noted your use of the phrase "way back" in your recent essay entitled Writing well in English no guarantee of speaking well in English.

In the last sentence in your post, part of which I quote here:

"... I wrote the essay below—rather harshly and dismissively, I regret to say—in my English-usage column in the Times way back in 2006."

I think you used "way back" correctly, in that the event (writing the essay) now seems like it happened ages ago to you because you now regret your dismissive and harsh tone.  There are still instances, however, where using "way back in" instead of simply "in" seems to me to be verbose.  I think using "way back" provides some kind of telescoping effect.  If I see that phrase, I expect to see somewhere in the sentence or paragraph immediately surrounding the phrase some reference or hint as to why the event is considered to be something which happened "from far in the past" or "from a much earlier time".  If there is no such reference, I feel like I am missing the point of why the writer used "way back".  In your sentence, as I said, the idea is complete because there is an element of regret.