Tuesday, January 6, 2009

"Yeah no..."

My new favorite phrase.

9 comments:

Dan S. said...

Do you know where it comes from? People I work in with in NY say it constantly.

Matt DiGangi said...

I have no idea where it comes from, but I don't think it's a regional thing, just one of the few delights of the dumbing down of our country in the past 8 years.

Matt DiGangi said...

"Yeah-no in Australian English is a relatively new marker which serves a number of functions, including discourse cohesion, the pragmatic functions of hedging and face-saving, and assent and dissent. Drawing on a corpus of approximately 30 hours of both informal conversation and interviews, we analyse the interaction between intonation and turntaking, and the use of yeah-no by topic, conversational genre, and age and gender of speaker. The results indicate that the peak of yeah-no production occurs among speakers aged 35-49 years, and gender differences are not apparent in this preliminary analysis."

More...
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005523.html

ty bluesmith said...

Hi. I know this is off topic but I really like the Sean Lovelace piece.

Matt DiGangi said...

What was your favorite part?

xTx said...

What Ty said.

He paints a great picture...and then sings it.

Jac Jemc said...

I liked the Sean Lovelace story a lot, too. And I think my favorite part was that usually if Jenna Jameson showed up in the bathroom of a story all of a sudden, I'd think, "What?!?" and this time I thought, "Yes!!!"

And then the narrator said, “Don’t need it, J,” and I laughed my tuckus off.

xTx said...

I like how the toilet paper was a chrysanthemum. (OMG I spelled that right the first try!)

Anonymous said...

honorable mention for my favorite:
"it is what it is"