Having been at the Freakonomics Radio podcast for a while now, I've noticed a trend. During an interview, you ask someone a question and, before they answer, they say "That's a great question!" Believe me, most of the questions I ask aren't that great. So what's going on here? Where did this reply come from? Is it a verbal tic, a strategic rejoinder, or something more?
That's the topic of our new episode, called (shockingly) "That's a Great Question!" (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)
You'll hear from the linguist Arika Okrent, who examined a few huge databases for us (including the British National Corpus and the Corpus of Contemporary American English) to see if the phrase is indeed as common as it seems.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/thats-a-great-question-a-new-freakonomics-radio-podcast/