Saturday, 10 October 2015

What's the meaning when we say "per se"?

Sometimes I read a sentence like the following one:




Objective-C does not provide a standard library, per se, but in most places..




I wonder how to interpret "per se." I'm non-native English speaker and in Swedish we have the expression "per se," but I don't understand it and maybe you can say that it means something like "in itself" (the strange Swedish expression is i och för sig) like Latin for de se as distinct from latin de facto, de re, de dicto, de jure, etc.



Do these expressions have a connection: "per se" and de se? Is it Latin and therefore I have difficulty to understand?



What is the difference between these sentences?



  • Breaking a traffic rule does not, per se, make you a burglar.

  • Breaking a traffic rule does not, per definition, make you a burglar.

  • Breaking a traffic rule does not, in itself, make you a burglar.

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