So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in coversations.
The popular slacker term of indefference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.
"Wharever" easily beat out "you know",which especially grated a quartar of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent),"it is what it is"(11 percent) and "at the end of the day"(2 percent).
"Whatever" pronounced ""WHAT-ehv-errr" when exasperated - in?an expression?with staying power.Immortalized in song by Nirvana("oh, well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popuplarized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade. It is still used commonly, often by younger people.
It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying.The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race,gender,age,income or where they live.
"it doesn't surprise me because 'whatever ' is in a special class, probably",said Micheal Adams, author of "Slang, the people's poetry" and an associate professor of English?at Indiana University. "It is a word that-and it depends how a speaker uses it-can suggest dismissivness".
Adams, who was not involved in the poll and was not annoyed by "whatever", points out that its use is not always negtive.It also can be used to in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like " six of one, half dozen of the other", he said.
But the negtive connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know", which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York US senate vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.
Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 US adults by telphone Agu. 3-Agu.6. The margine of error was 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll after discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.
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good
very good~
