Speak To (That)

A phrase people who want to sound intellectual™ use for “address”.

I will speak to that later. This event speaks to the need for clarity. Can you speak to that? This odious, sermonising, and idiomatic phrasing has a 400+ year-old history from Parliament and the pulpit, but took on ubiquity in the early 2000s. It only has one purpose: to elevate the speaker in the eyes of the listener.

• https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&content=speak+to+that
• https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=speak+to+that