No word, usage, or phrase will ever annoy me: linguistic waffle, rabbit, and prate

I was delighted earlier when walking across campus I overheard a guy say "thanks for helping out" and his buddy replied "you already know". The tension between intelligibility and overuse being a constant with language, I like to see the new alternatives pop up in the wild. With reference to an earlier ILX discussion about dissatisfaction with "no worries" and "no problem", but here in a new thread I would like to be freed from any notion of overarching disapproval, but instead frame inherent and ongoing conflicts in language as visceral joys of being both mortal humans and native speakers.

Me: This usage annoys me
Also me: Let's interrogate the shit out of it linguistically until we can't even tell if we love it or hate it

That said, I can't quite get a handle on what "you already know" means. It seems very context dependent.

i am in favor of the permanent waffle

to me, i imagine the person saying "you already know" to mean "you already know it's no big deal, no need to say it"

it's just like "no need to thank me...i love you so much"

or maybe it's the positive mirror version of how bob dylan felt when you had to ask him where it was at, in idiot wind.

makes relative sense as an update on 'don't mention it' (be funny if service staff picked it up)

Great stuff, now we just need to delete that other thread and ilx is good

Yes, in that exchange it was clearly showing affection, and the frisson of only having heard it being used in a more confrontational way before was exciting. But mostly I like that it has an unsettled semantic valence.

I wish the other thread well, I felt like I was derailing it whenever I commented so I started this one.

I wish it ill but will agitate elsewhere 🙂

It's one end of the dipole of human language... the utility of structure vs the desire for novelty. We hate it when language changes but can't resist novel usage. Prescriptivism in language is bad for a number of reasons, but one in particular is that it undervalues wordplay as a foundational aspect of language. It's as fundamental as syntax, or lexicon... any of those aspects we have traditionally built castles around and defended. Except it likes to destroy them!

I agree with "you already know" being the end of an experience that probably began with the answer, "you don't even have to ask!"

But on the flip side, replacing "oughta" with "already" in that Alanis Morrisette song would've made the narrator seem even more unhinged. "Oughta" at least pretends to give the benefit of the doubt.

Found myself describing a faculty member just now as "staple-happy" and decided to investigate the operation of -happy as a suffix (noun + happy = adjective, meaning "careless or overenthusiastic use of noun"), the first two variants found being trigger-happy and slap happy, the latter a sort of synonym for punch-drunk and not quite the same usage to me.

Then I see happy has a Germanic origin—from the noun hap "chance, luck, fate"—and seems to have narrowed in modern usage to simply mean "content, in a good mood" whereas the original sense of the word was "lucky" (see related word happenstance) we would probably use "fortunate" now to get that meaning. Similarly "happen", a longtime contemporary and synonym of "befall", merely refers to occurrence with only a degree of implied passivity remaining to evoke the association with luck or fate. Of course I assume, where I could ask. Does "happy" for anyone still evoke a sense of good fortune and not just a good mood?

This is an instance of narrowing, which is a type of semantic change that seems to often go unnoticed or unremarked upon compared to semantic broadening, which people notice and do not like!

"you already know" is a black thing and it's kind of like saying "i got you" but the way I've heard it used, it implies that the favor was something pretty important and in this instance I can't help but think it involved a girl or drugs

or maybe money? there an implied wink ime

this is an instructive video about the phrase, and where I first encountered it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0rrNcZp0CQ

Does "happy" for anyone still evoke a sense of good fortune and not just a good mood?

By a happy circumstance, some well-worn phrases still carry faint echoes of this early meaning. Mayhaps it shall rise again to eclipse the newcomer 'serendipitous' in our hearts and on our tongues.

good thread

waffle is imo fundamentally generous in origin, the other thread often comes from the opposite place (as does most ilx analysis of anything ordinary people do) so this is welcome

A while ago I noticed that the US bit of my family (roughly, upper Midwesterners) would often respond to a “thank you” with something that seemed to be an agreement (“sure” / “of course” / “uh huh”) where as a UK speaker I’m more used to the response being something that minimizes the effort or inconvenience (“pleasure” / “no problem” / “don’t mention it” etc)

I suppose “you already know” is an example of the former but seems to have elements of the latter.

(AFAICT all the above were comprehensible by all concerned. In context all just function as acknowledgements of the “thanks”, right? The literal meanings of the words don’t matter much if at all.)

we're working our way back toward just grunting as the primary form of communication. everyone made fun of the Yo app, but in the year 2520 Yo will be Cervantes and Tim Allen's grunting on Home Improvement will be Macbeth

thinking about the way the term "gatekeep" has evolved from describing something structural to something attitudinal. these days it's not even always about access per se (although it does get used in the sense of "withholding information"); it can also just refer to staking a claim of true fandom against casual fans or poseurs. if everyone theoretically has access to a cultural object, gatekeeping is merely a posture intended to maintain a special or exclusive relationship toward it.

this is probably due to the popular "gatekeeping" subreddit

this kind of behavior has always existed, obv., it's just kind of interesting it's now referred to as "gatekeeping," which used to have a narrower definition relating to the structural mechanisms by which culture was disseminated to the public. individual gatekeepers were people in positions of power (publishers, critics, etc.) rather than fans.

good thread

waffle is imo fundamentally generous in origin, the other thread often comes from the opposite place (as does most ilx analysis of anything ordinary people do) so this is welcome

― deems of internment (darraghmac), Thursday, 31 October 2019 03:42 (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

good post but a _great_ display name tbf

i always thought gatekeeping extended far beyond cultural hogging -- to me it's about access/cutting off access to people who are unwanted in the in-group. it's a feature of the insider/outsider dynamic that can be applied in a variety of contexts. in some ways it's similar to cronyism or even nepotism in its selective extension of whatever we define as goodies and opportunities to a chosen few.

La Lechera otm… it’s gotten used more recently in a political/social justice sense and less about who has a right to proclaim what is the best album by a band

Hmm, I don't know that I've come across those usages -- can you give an example?

just reviving this to say last week in my office I heard "out of pocket" used three different ways by three different people in one morning

-me, telling a grad student they'd be out of pocket for their airfare until the trip was over and I could reimburse it
-our undergraduate advisor telling us she'd be out of pocket between 11am-2pm meeting with students
-our work study calling me out of pocket for insulting the entire current generation of undergraduates for being hopeless rule-followers

this of course delighted me

Nice. Some time in the 2000s I used the phrase "off the hook" (as in "no longer obligated") to a colleague. Like, "I was going to ask you to write this thing, but I found it elsewhere, so you're off the hook." He took it in a then-current slangier sense and did an exaggerated faux hip-hop "aw, that's off the hook that I'm off the hook."

the second out of pocket usage eludes me

Unavailable, like out of office or out of town.

I think that's a pretty North American English idiom, I know I've heard it here in Texas my entire life

(like to me it reads as a very much as a Southern good ol' boy kinda thing to say, which is one reason why I found it fun to hear from a thirtysomething woman who is from the Baltimore area)

I thought it meant “behaving inappropriately” — out of bounds.

An American thing.

If an NFL quarterback is out of pocket he can't be penalized for intentional grounding, iirc

intentional grounding is what my morning meditation class is called

also what my parents did if I was out of pocket past 10pm on a school night

I was out of the pocket and had to duck a punch from Charles Mingus

In 1985 my mom sent me to the store because we were out of Hot Pockets

I thought it meant “behaving inappropriately” — out of bounds.

that's f hazel's third example!

Like "out of order" then - which I'm guessing isn't used in that sense in the US?

Only in a parliamentary (rules of order) sense. The rest if the time it means a broken vending machine.

pocky outs

Yes but I thought that’s what it meant exclusively. I’ve never heard the other two usages, esp as “out of town”or “out of the office”

the second usage seems like the newest one and has a whiff of corporate jargon about it.

but surely you've heard the first? as in "out of pocket expenses" -- expenses you pay for yourself instead of being covered by insurance or some other party.

I think of the second one more as generally unavailable / unreachable.

Oh yeah I did not go back to check. I just woke up ffs

let LL get some coffee

anyway the usage meaning "unavailable" has an attested use back in 1908 (by O. Henry lol)... idioms always older than we think they are, I was thinking 60s/70s!