Expressive Lengthening is Eaaaaaaaasy

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Seibert from Salisbury, Maryland.

Hey, John, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind today?

I noticed in everyday speech with my professional colleagues,

Which we work in a political and a legal arena, and everybody is very well spoken,

But I noticed that when something needs to be prioritized in a text,

Extra letters are added, like, to make it a top priority, say something like, we want this account so bad, like S-O-O-O bad.

And I was wondering if that’s a modern thing because of texting as a way to prioritize or if that’s older or if there’s an origin to it.

There’s a lot of examples that I can use.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That’s very common.

But you do this in the office at a legal firm?

It was actually – it actually more is in the informal text.

But these people are very well-spoken, so they could easily say, please prioritize this account.

But when you see we really want this account so bad, that changes the perspective a little bit.

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t know if you know this phenomenon, but when you notice something, you notice it even more.

Like when I first called the show, eventually I’m seeing it everywhere now.

And I’m noticing that it’s used for many different things like impatience, importance, description.

And it can be used in the consonant or the vowel.

And it can be used different ways.

Like you could say, that really hurt with a lot of R’s.

Or you could say, that hurt so bad.

And they mean two different things.

That’s true. Yeah, there’s a lot to say about this.

And first, it’s not new.

Second, it’s not only English.

And third, it’s not just one emotion.

It’s not just emphasis, for example, though it often is.

The French philosopher and linguist Charles Hagage wrote about this and translated into English.

He wrote about what he called the expressive lengthening of vowels,

Which often translates into superlatives or insistence.

And he also writes about sometimes it can be other emotions like tenderness

Or the speech addressed to children or a dialogue between lovers.

And so there are all these different ways that we can do this.

And then there are languages where this expressive lengthening,

Which is the official term in linguistics, is a feature of the language itself.

So some languages, like various Native American languages spoken in Canada, will add extra characters to change a verb tense to indicate, say, a continuing action or a past action.

And so adding more characters is about something intrinsic to the grammar of the language.

It’s pretty amazing how deep the rabbit hole goes for these extra letters.

Well, you knew who you were calling, right?

I originally…

It goes way!

Way down.

It does.

I originally, when I just started thinking about the origin, I was like, well, maybe it just started with Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

And we just picked it up.

Well, yeah, so the English way that we do this, this expressive lengthening, we find it most common these days in casual uses, just like the ones that you gave us.

Of course, the fantastic book, Because Internet, by linguist Gretchen McCulloch, talks about this.

And she talks about how it’s not just the vowel, but sometimes we add extra consonants, even when we don’t pronounce those consonants, or even when it’s impossible to lengthen those consonants.

Like, we might add more G’s to OMG, but you don’t really say OMG to lengthen that.

It’s strictly a visual trick.

You know, it’s strictly something for text.

It’s not something you say aloud.

But expressive lengthening can be audible or it can just be visual.

But the effect can be very similar in either case.

An example of a consonant would be something like, I am never going there again.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I myself have a problem adding more consonants, particularly when I think the, if I were to say it aloud, the vowel is the thing that I would lengthen.

But others will have no problem.

For them, it’s always the last letter, no matter what it is.

That’s the one that they stretch out to indicate that the whole word would be stretched.

Yeah, I have trouble adding vowels because like never if I added the E, then it would be never.

You want to say it as if that letter becomes more pronounced.

Most of the examples that we’ve mentioned in English so far are really about emphasis.

And their emphasis on some other emotion that has been successfully conveyed to the hearer or the reader.

That’s a really important part of the written necessity because, and this is a term you’ve heard me mention on the show before,

We have this very important task that we’re constantly doing in written language, which is paralinguistic restitution.

And this complicated term simply means we’re trying to do things in the written language that are very easy to do in the spoken language.

So we’re constantly trying to find new ways to indicate extreme emotion or emphasis.

Stuff that’s very easy to do with the eyebrows or hand gestures.

Like I’m waving my hand now as I’m talking and you can’t see it.

But it’s a thing that I can’t easily do in text.

So when I’m speaking aloud, I can go, ugh.

How do I represent that in text?

Well, is it a bunch of A’s, U’s, and a G-H?

Maybe it is.

Well, I really appreciate it.

It’s been very educational.

John, we thank you for your time.

Give us a call again sometime, all right?

Thank you very much.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, John noticed something about language and he called us.

You can do the same, 877-929-9673.