Word Routes
Exploring the pathways of our lexicon
At the End of the Day, What's, You Know, Annoying? Whatever!
It was all over the news yesterday: according to a new poll from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, whatever is the word that Americans find most annoying. The poll asked respondents which word or phrase bothered them the most, and whatever easily swamped the competition, with 47 percent naming it the most annoying. You know came in at 25 percent, it is what it is at 11 percent, anyway at 7 percent, and at the end of the day at 2 percent. Despite the widespread media attention, we should ask: does this poll really tell us anything useful?
First, it's important to note that the five words and phrases were preselected by the Marist pollsters. As you can see from the table of results that accompanied the announcement, 938 Americans were asked, "Which one of the following words or phrases do you find most annoying in conversation?" So there was no opportunity to pick a word or phrase that might annoy you more than the ones that Marist inquired about.
If the poll had been more open-ended, it's obvious that whatever wouldn't have approached anything close to 47 percent. Rather, reactions would have been much more scattered, along the lines of the "least favorite words" from Visual Thesaurus subscribers that I reported on back in May in my column, "Which Words Do You Love and Which Do You Hate?" As I mentioned there, whatever is indeed among those words most often listed as "least favorite" in Visual Thesaurus subscriber profiles, but it lags behind such other words as hate, no, like, impossible, and, of course, moist. We don't know how the Marist respondents felt about those words because they weren't asked.
It reminds me a bit of how Walter Cronkite got to be known as "the most trusted man in America." He ranked the highest in the "trust index" as determined by a 1972 poll, but as I discussed on the NPR show "On the Media," Cronkite's competition in the poll mostly consisted of politicians — not generally considered the most trustworthy types by Americans. We don't actually know how Cronkite would have stacked up against other news anchors like NBC's John Chancellor or ABC's Harry Reasoner.
So the annoyance leveled at whatever in the Marist poll is certainly inflated. News reporting about the poll didn't do the words in question much justice either. CNN, for instance, attributed the popularity of whatever and anyway to "the release of popular films like 'Clueless' (1995) and 'Valley Girl' (1983)," disdainfully noting that "both are about the shallow lives of teenagers in suburban California."
Californian youth, especially Valley Girls, often get the blame for disliked colloquialisms. But as Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower told NPR's "All Things Considered," whatever has roots predating the rise of the Valley Girl phenomenon in the early '80s. The OED records a usage of the modern sense of whatever in a 1973 document prepared by the Department of Defense for returning POWs, defining the word as "equivalent to 'that's what I meant.'" The document observes that the word "usually implies boredom with topic or lack of concern for a precise definition of meaning." And in 1982, a year before the "Valley Girl" movie, the San Francisco Examiner was already griping about the spread of whatever. (The Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" that helped inspire the movie didn't have whatever in it, though young Moon Unit Zappa did say anyway and you know.)
The phrases it is what it is and at the end of the day have received disparagement more recently as bits of vacuous talk associated with management-speak. In a series of posts last month on Language Log (1, 2, 3), Mark Liberman looked into usage of at the end of the day and found that it is not actually so characteristic of management-speak, though its recent rise in popularity is undeniable. It's even more prevalent on the other side of the Atlantic: check out this YouTube video to see how at the end of the day has taken over the speech patterns of guests on Jeremy Kyle's talk show (a British counterpart to Jerry Springer).
Which words and phrases that were left off the Marist poll bother you the most? Sound off in the comments below!
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Not "I like candy," but
"He like wanted to go immediately.
She told me like it was hard.
Like how many times do I have to do this?"
Could this be a disease that has infiltrated our society,
starting in the teen population?
We need an inoculation.
1. Like
2. You know
Both are equally horrible!!! It's not in the word, it's in the abominous habit and manner of usage. Blood freezing, sheer horror, pure "linguistic terrorism."
how many hands does a person have?
"you know" - well how does the speaker know that I/we know?
Users of 'like', 'you know' and 'basically' are giving their untrained and unpractised brains time to formulate the next part of their sentence. So basically I'm saying we shouldn't get angry at the users of these particular expressions which are nothing but, like, drops of oil to, you know, lubricate their sentences.
So campaign for speaking lessons at your local high school (and be politely shown the door, I wager) or lock up all computers and cell phones (too late) but don't criticise the speakers because it sounds like the educated dissing the poorly educated, and educated people should basically know better.
I was sure some one would beat me to this one: Embolophrasias—insertions of sound to fill up pauses between articulate speech. Isn't it a lovely word.
Please. Will someone tell me the correct term. This one can't be right. Who ever heard of an articulate valley girl.
Actually, pauses in speech and the noises that fill them are so common that a patent has been granted for transcription software that suppresses them so they don't slow down transcribers. http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6161087/description.html
Also, patterns for the frequency of their use, and variety of --do I dare --embolophrases, vs. the sometimes quite frequent use of a single sound vary widely among languages. Have you listened to an Egyptian lately?
Given the variety of circumstances and ambiguity of thought behind the detested phrases, perhaps they should also be candidates for "the most connotative expressions poll."
Cause a hick is a hick is a hick, and can take the most grandiose of terms and turn them into, like, sour pudding.
But really, I talk like this because it shows, like, my innermost teenage angst, ya know? And at the end of the day, its all about me sounding like, well, like me, ya know? And if thats the hand that bites the dog that feeds it, then like it like suits me just fine.
On a more serious note, I do believe that the problems in verbal and written english stem from a lack of education...and a desire to warp the normative structures to better fit a collection of dysfunctional personalities.
There's no real solution, at the end of the day, ya know, but if you don't stop trying, you'll, like, drive yourself mad. Ya know?
"heavy lifting"? I can't, because
"my plate is full". Besides,
"I'm the new kid on the block". And
"BTW", I haven't
"been around the block" yet. I don't mind using
"throw in the towel", but some of my non-American friends
"haven't a clue" as to it's meaning.
This has already happened in the UK in terms of pronunciation. Historically, our aristos long ago established the proper way of speaking, which became known as the 'King's English'. It's very simple: place a plum in your mouth, keep the upper lip stiff as a board, and then speak without opening your mouth wider than, say, one eighth of an inch - 3mm. This produces the contorted vowels and inchoate consonants that are gloriously demonstrated by Prince Charles (the heir to our throne) every time he makes one of his controversial pronouncements about the latest modernist building, which is often (or, as he would say, 'orphan').
Then the Revolution occurred - yes, I'm afraid so, it was in the 60s, and yes, of course, it was down to the Beatles, like every other change that's happened here. They were the first British band not to sing in a pseudo-transatlantic accent, and when they became celebrities they didn't lose their gutteral Liverpool accents when they spoke.
Since they were the new Royalty, everyone followed their lead and kept their regional accents - and we knew the New Order was established when such speech was allowed on the BBC. Now people who speak with what's also called 'Received Pronunciation' (about 2% according to Wikipedia) are regarded as quaint and slightly laughable - but these 2% have the last laugh, of course, because they still own probably 90% of this country's wealth (discounting David Beckham, who inserts, by the way, despite being worth £25m, more 'you knows' in his speech than anyone I, you know, know).
And so it will be for all of us literati. We will be quaint and slightly laughable because we won't employ these speech fillers - and we won't even have the consolation of owning 90% of our nations' wealth. Lackaday.
Then, for literary types, how about "trope" and "meme"--even typing them makes me nauseous!
it exposes a flabbyness of brain akin to tallow on the melt and, with a stench to match.
As for 'innit', as mentioned by Radlet6, (an expression which made me laugh, in a way I did not laugh for quite a while), I have to admit that it is on this list of comments that I have became aware about its existence, though on second thoughts, it could have been part of Eliza Dolittle’s initial repertoire, and for some reason escaped me.
If I would be asked to say which one of the comments was the wittiest so far, undoubtly my choice would be Radlet6 comment. Absolutely adorable! (however, the words of one of my language teachers reverberate in my mind to admonish my laughter: he used to say, you have no right to laugh at someone you did not teach what is the right way of saying or doing this or that ). Perhaps it is a laughing matter for some people, but in actual fact it is a real tragedy. Is there another species, apart of mankind, that does not care at all about the future of its offspring?
The remainder of that list is because it is trite, and used by people too lazy to develop a vocabulary. My father always said that a person who punctuated his speech with profanity simply lacked the vocabulary to express him/herself. He was known to utter an occasional expletive when it was called for, but he could string words together without using it.
Why is it so hard to say "First of all, Secondly," etc.?
But "I mean . . . ." is something that has started creeping into my verbal communications. I mean, I might have it conquered by the end of the year though.
Or on a weekly basis. Or monthly basis. So much more impressive than simply, "daily", "weekly", "monthly".
These filler words spoken from the lips of strangers, acquaintances, friends and family have annoyed me for years.
In my opinion, Take Care should only be used in times of trouble and never used from a stranger. When a stranger says this to me it feels insincere, dismissive and down right annoying. One of these times I'm going to say Take care of what? If they respond (setting them up) "yourself” I might just blurt out, oh how nice of you, do you really mean it even though you just rang up my groceries and I've never seen you before.
Chances are pretty good that my verbal edit button will be on and I would never blurt out the above response. However I can assure you that the invisible thought bubble above my head will be spewing off grumble words.
If strangers are going to continue to attempt to use filler words to cut the silence or sincerely say something nice to me without using "Take Care" I'd rather them say something like, "Stay our of trouble young lady" (I'm middle aged) or "Go have some fun" or just "see you next time".