It was never needed in the past and ads no context that a simple exclamation point or bold letters could do if a person wants to add emphasis.
It was never needed in the past and ads no context that a simple exclamation point or bold letters could do if a person wants to add emphasis.
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It’s being used as an adversative conjunction, connecting a phrase (usually a clause) with whatever precedes it, in a way that highlights that the precedent would incorrectly imply something.
Here are some examples showing it:
Examples #1 and #2 are pretty much equivalent: the first sentence introduces an information (that “tho” is like a “but”), that information implies something incorrect (if “tho” is like a “but”, it would go at the start of the preceding sentence, right?), and the second sentence contradicts said implication (nope - it goes at the end). With the “but” or the “tho”, that contradiction is explicit.
Now look at #3 - it sounds like [incorrectly] saying that “but” goes at the end of the sentence, unlike #1 or #2.
The idea of a conjunction going after the elements being “conjoined” might sound a bit weird, but it’s worth noting that it’s nothing new. Latin for example used -que (additive conjunction; “and”) this way, it went after everything that you were joining. (Classical examples: “arma uirumque cano” [I sing the arms and men] and “Senatus Populusque Romanus” [Roman Senate and People].
Now, on why it’s being used this way: there’s the spelling and the increased usage.
“Tho” as a short form for “though” is actually old as fuck, with Merrian-Webster claiming that it was already uncommonly used in the 18xx. It can be seen as a short form that became more socially accepted nowadays, at least in informal writing. And in special, this sort of “grammatical word” (conjunctions, articles, adpositions, copula verb etc.) tends to be rather small, as you’ll use it all the time.
And the usage of “though” as an adversative conjunction is even older, being attested at the 12th century. Probably way older given that cognates in other Germanic languages also have the adversative meaning, even the Old Norse descendants like Icelandic.
I’m not sure on what I’m going to say, but I think that the increased modern usage is the result of some changes on how people interpret “but”. A lot of people have been treating “but” as if it contradicted completely the preceding discourse, like:
That probably led to increased usage of “though” because it’s used after whatever you said the relevant piece of info.
@lvxferre there’s an old trend in New Zealand and Australia to put “but” at the end of a sentence too, but.
That’s interesting.
It might be a parallel development to address the same issue. It isn’t like people incorrectly interpreting what others say is a new thing.
Another possibility is that, initially, the “but” came as an afterthought, to highlight the contradiction. Then in Oz+Kiwi English it became frequent enough to be conventionalised. Like (reusing my example from the earlier comment):
A third possibility would be that that “but” initially implied something that got clipped for succinctness. I find it a bit unlikely due to your example, but I’ve seen people doing it with Portuguese “mas” (but):
I catch myself doing that when speaking, and it always makes me feel stupid. It’s like the speaking part of the brain is waiting for the thinking part to add a counter-point, but the thinking part is just like “sorry, I got nothing”.