"Inshallah"

You've probably heard about this — Teo Armas, "‘Inshallah’: The Arabic ‘fuggedaboudit’ Biden dropped to blast Trump on tax returns", WaPo 9/30/2020:

Midway through Tuesday night’s chaotic presidential debate, as President Trump vowed to release his still-private tax returns, Joe Biden shot back at his opponent with a particularly sarcastic jab.

“Millions of dollars, and you’ll get to see it,” Trump said of the amount he claims to have paid.

“When?” the Democratic presidential nominee interjected. “Inshallah?”

The WaPo article links to an article by Rebecca Clift and Fadi Helani, "Inshallah: Religious invocations in Arabic topic transition", Language in Society 2010, whose abstract helps explain why it might have come naturally to Biden, whose son Beau served a tour in Iraq:

The phrase inshallah ‘God willing’ is well known, even to non-Arabic speakers, as a mitigator of any statement regarding the future, or hopes for the future. Here we use the methods of conversation analysis (CA) to examine a less salient but nonetheless pervasive and compelling interactional usage: in topic-transition sequences. We use a corpus of Levantine (predominantly Syrian) Arabic talk-in-interaction to pay detailed attention to the sequential contexts of inshallah and its cognates across a number of exemplars. It emerges that these invocations are used to secure possible sequence and topic closure, and that they may engender reciprocal invocations. Topical talk following invocations or their responses is subsequently shown to be suspended by both parties; this provides for a move to a new topic by either party. (Arabic, religious expressions, conversation, conversation analysis, topic)*

An American colonel in Iraq, writing to The Washington Post’s Thomas E. Ricks, recently observed: “The phrase ‘inshallah’ or ‘God willing’, has permeated all ranks of the Army. When you talk to U.S. soldiers about the possible success of ‘the surge’, you’d be surprised how many responded with ‘inshallah’.” The phrase seems to have permeated all ranks of the diplomatic corps, too: Zalmay Khalilzad, when he was the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, once stated at a conference, “Inshallah, Iraq will succeed.” (Murphy 2007)

And the WaPo article quotes Helani about ironic or sarcastic usage of the phrase:

When used in formal Arabic, including in media interviews or news conferences by politicians in the Arab world, he said, inshallah serves as an expression of hope for a desired outcome. Yet in informal conversation, inshallah can also be used sarcastically to mean that the hope or statement is too good to be true.

“If somebody says talks about passing a test, and you say, ‘inshallah,’ that means you’re hoping they pass,” Helani said. “But if somebody says that, and you know they’re a lazy student, ‘inshallah’ means you don’t believe them at all.”

This reminds me of how the phrase "bless your heart" has evolved in the American south.

It also echoes an early LLOG conversation about the original meaning of "under God":

"One nation [head], under God [adjunct]", 6/14/2004 "Dysfunctional shift", 6/16/2004 "Never say never", 6/16/2004 "I might have guessed Parson Weems would figure in their somewhere", 6/20/2004 "'(Next) Under God,' phrasal idiom", 6/20/2004

Geoff Nunberg's conclusion from that series:

In short, the phrase "under God" had nothing to do with God's temporal sovereignity; it was, rather, a way of acknowledging that the efforts of men are always contingent on His providence. And that is how Lincoln intended it, as meaning something like "with God's help, of course":

Meanwhile, here's the debate fragment, if (like me) you had bailed on that dumpster fire earlier in the evening: