Whatever!

Over the two week holiday break, I made some notes and stashed away a few links to supply blog topics in the new year.

Anyway, I was cleaning out my email files today and I came across an article from the end of last year that I made note of. Marist University conducted a survey of 1,173 earlier in December and determined the ‘most annoying’ word for 2013 was the very flip/somewhat causal: 

Whatever!

For some reason, when I hear that word, I imagine a young lady – speaking in vocal fry – and she blows her bangs out of the way after she dismisses something she finds trivial. Marist notes it does this survey every year and the word ‘whatever’ has topped the charts five years running.

I’m not surprised.

Other annoying terms in the Marist Top 10 include such notables as

• “Like”  (as in “I was like going to see my like friend and like he said he was like leaving…”)
• “You know” (as in “I was you know going to see my you know friend and you know he said he was you know leaving…”
• “Obviously” (I guess the readers found that to be too condescending…obviously).

I wonder what makes us use those sort of verbal space fillers? Are we trying to soften a message? Are we trying to stall as our mind forms thoughts and puts them into phrases? Is it something we do because “it’s cool.” Is it a nervous tick?

Or is it all of the above?

A few years back, I wrote about corporate buzzwords (aligned, lockstep, take it to the next level, step up, paradigm shift…). These are phrases uttered in the world of work. I think those who use them are trying to sound more important? I’m not sure.

If that is the case, then, maybe these are the pre-corporate buzzwords. We learn to talk at an early age. Why not  try this as well?

Holly told us of a hipster classmate in her college class a year or so ago. This student found life in East Tennessee to be so bourgeois. Anything she considered beneath her was deemed to be ‘so annoying.’ Traffic. Music. The color orange.

She was happy to share this reality with her classmates.

Say it all together, now, using vocal fry: “Soooo annoying.”  You’ve got the picture.

Not sure where all of this is going. I would imagine our Founding Fathers would be appalled at where we have taken the King’s English some 239 years after our nation began. And yet, we obviously are far beyond the days of ‘thee and thou.’ Is there a happy medium?

In the meantime, I guess I’ll just go on doing what I’m doing. I will write Coach Jeff’s Blog and hope that I manage to stay out of the Top Ten for 2014.

JG

Originally posted 1/9/2014