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