Mudslinging Via E-Mail

It was also about 2003 that I first heard “Seriously?” and “Really?” from a colleague, then noticed it some time later on SNL.  These pop up in conversations usually when someone says or does something stupid, and the other person says (asks?) “Seriously, you’re going to do that?” as if trying to convince the first party to reconsider.  It’s all in the tone, as far as I can tell, because most of the time the word “seriously” would actually make sense.  That the word makes sense is pretty much the opposite of “Yeah, no…”, which I heard first from a fellow graduate student c. 2000.

Dr. JT: Yeah, no, you’re right. As far as I can tell this is an expression of agreement to a negative assertion or at least a previous comment with some contextual negative implications. It is hugely irritating and yet I find that i’ve “caught it” and have used it unconsciously in conversation. Sorry, eh.

I recently realized that I’d been hearing Bostonians begin long responses with “Right?” when I read it in a newer Dennis Lehane novel and it rang in my mind like a bell. So I was interested to read here that it’s reminiscent of a British usage. Bahston rahks. 

I vividly recall having a conversation about this very thing when I was working with a company of actors in not-quite-upstate New York. One of them, a transplant from somewhere in the Midwest, had noticed the “yeah, right” agreement usage. He thought it was weird since he’d only ever heard the sarcasm usage; he suggested that it was unique to New Yorkers. This was in Summer 1997. Of course, this was just in conversation, so I don’t have an actual citation. It’d be interesting to see if it showed up in, say, “Goodfellas.”

I always interpret it as an opportunity to disagree. I might have been listening along happily, but then the speaker says “right?” and I think “well… maybe not, actually!” It’s sort of like how my mother never ended her threats to us with “okay?” because then we could say “nope, not okay with me!”

I tend to use “right?” a lot (maybe excessively) in certain situations, like explaining something to a fellow student. A simple declarative like “‘Every man’ can’t take scope here because it would violate Condition C” is inappropriate; it sends the message that I’m telling them something they don’t know. If I were their TA or something — if it were my job to explain things to them that they didn’t know — then this would be fine. But in a peer relationship, I feel like it’s politer not to “tell” people things. “‘Every man’ can’t take scope here because it would violate Condition C, right?” is better because 1) it implies that they already knew that, even if they didn’t, and 2) I’m allowing for the possibility that I’m wrong (“that’s what’s happening, right? Tell me if I’ve got it wrong!”).

Luckily (?), my peers don’t ask me to explain things to them very often.

Maybe it’s just because I switched from being a linguistics professor to being a lawyer 14 years ago, but I don’t recall ever hearing–never mind using–any of these expressions.  My own children, one of whom is a sophomore in college and the other of whom is a junior in high school, certainly don’t use “right?,” or “I know, right?” in any context, though “Yeah, right.” certainly appears in their speech to indicate sarcasm.  But “I know, right?” sounds as foreign to me as “n’est-ce pas.”  I suspect I’m unfamiliar with these uses because I no longer converse with college students but instead with other lawyers, who certainly don’t use these phrases in everyday speech.  So today’s academics and students might regularly end utterances with “right,” but lawyers and businessmen (with whom I have more contact on a daily basis than I’d care to) certainly don’t.  So this seems to be a linguistic feature of adolescent speech that is not applicable to the general public.

Rand Hutcheson

French speakers encourage tacit agreement and acknowledge explicit agreement with “D’accord.” Speakers of Spanish drop in lots of extraneous “Claro”s. Aren’t these much like “right?.”

Here’s an earlier citation, from Robertson Davies’ _Murther & Walking Spirits_, published in 1991:

“Not so my wife.  She was manly and decisive and I admired her self-command.  ‘Of course the police,’ she said.  ‘A man has been murdered.  Right? It must be reported immediately. Right? Have you worked on a newspaper and you don’t know that? Do as I say and be quick about it.’

Had these two been lovers?  What tenderness was to be felt now? The only sign my wife gave that her nerves were shaken was that she had returned to her old trick of interposing that interrogative clincher ‘Right?’ into her conversation.  I thought I had broken her of that, but in this moment of crisis she reverted to type.  She had never been what I call a good writer.  No serious regard for language.”

So perhaps the American use of “right” trickled down from Canada sometime in the 90s.

In Spanish it sounds something like this, “Esa mujer esta fea, no?” ….translates to “That woman is ugly, right”. Nice article!

She only wrote the screenplay.  So much less contribution than directing, right?

Oh dear. This article makes me feel young. I didn’t even know there was a time before “I know, right?”

Someone should look at how literate, educated young people (er, folks like me)—prancin’ around universities, gettin’ learned and all that—self-consciously and “ironically” use misspellings and leet speak, even in speech. Srsly, what has the internet done to me? (That’s pronounced “surrzly,” by the way.)

I’m amazed that this post has been up for three weeks (I’m behind on my blogroll, as always) and nobody has mentioned the acronym IKR.  In other words, “I know, right?” is such a hardened part of the lexicon that it’s been reduced to three letters in blog comments, text messages, and so on.