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

Question

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.

Answer 1

Per se (underlined since they are words from a foreign language) means, as you have deduced, "in itself", or "in the nature of the thing". In Latin, that is literally "through itself", because "through" is used for this idea in Latin, though not in English. Your last three sentences are very close in meaning; the only distinction is that the middle sentence would best make sense if the terms being discussed could be exactly defined. These differ from Latin derived expressions beginning with de, or "out from", in that the best translation into English for these is to use "in". So de facto translates as "in fact", which you use when you want to point out that perhaps by a law or a rule condition A ought to obtain, but in the real world (in fact) condition B obtains instead.