Non-Word Utterances Also Have Meaning

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yeah, this is John from Pasadena.

Hey, John.

Hi, John, welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Yes, sir.

I’m wondering about this quirk that my mom and her sister have.

It’s like this nonverbal sound, which they do, which sounds like, and I take it to mean sort of, well, there you go, or what else did you expect, or something like that.

My question is, is this kind of quirk a typical thing?

And second part to that question is, why am I seemingly able to assign a pretty specific meaning to what’s essentially just a tone?

Interesting. What’s their background?

Yeah, so they’re both native English speakers from the Northwest.

And can you recap that for us?

So what’s happening before they make that noise?

Typically, a precursor to that would be some sort of event, which is, I guess, either disappointing or exasperating.

And one of them would go, —

Interesting. Really interesting.

And so you learned that means what? That they’re disappointed or that the situation’s bad?

Yeah. So that’s the general sense.

And I’ve never actually asked them to translate what that means.

But from what I gather, it kind of means something along the lines of, well, what else did you expect?

Or, you know, there you go.

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Super interesting.

I wonder if I would have picked that up from context had you not described it to me.

I mean, if I met your mother and your aunt, would I have into it exactly what they were referring to?

But now I know and I can undo that knowledge.

Yeah.

So I actually have another friend who has a pretty similar one, too.

And he’s never described what his means either.

And from what I gather from both the tone and the context, his kind of means like, well, the here we go again, kind of an exasperated one as well.

He’ll do when someone’s kind of going into kind of a common territory where they’re doing something typical that tends to be annoying or exasperating.

He’ll go,

Oh, well, that one sounds a little bit like the schoolyard one where somebody was getting into trouble, doesn’t it?

A little bit, yeah.

The one that your mother says to me sounds a little bit like somebody going, huh.

Like they’re saying, yep, just as I predicted, this is a big mess.

Yeah, exactly.

And we find, so just to get to the linguistic core of this, what we’re really talking about here are these lexicalized and non-lexicalized utterances.

An utterance is anything that comes out of your mouth.

It doesn’t have to have meaning, but if you lexicalize it, you’re basically turning into something that can be used in the larger linguistic compositions that we speak.

And so when we look at the lexicalization of these utterances, we’re always looking at the company they keep.

What is around them?

You’ve done a really great job of describing the context and the situation here.

But there’s some really common ones that more people are going to know that I think will kind of give you this moment of like, okay.

One of them is O, OH.

An OH we use that in a variety of contexts for example if you said I’m im firing you Grant

And I’m gonna need the last two weeks of pay back from you and I go oh that’s an O of surprise.

But if you tell me the moon does circle around the earth and earth doesn’t circle around the moon and I go oh then it’s an O of understanding and so we have all these different ways to lexicalize that one utterance.

O on its own has no meaning whatsoever. It only has meaning when it keeps company with other words.

Oh. Oh. Skeptical. Yeah, we could probably do a hundred different O’s.

And words like and also, like when you see people kind of ripping into other folks for saying all the time, what’s really interesting is to go back to the original words, if you can find them, or even better, hear them, and you’ll find again and again and again that often has a meaning in those sentences.

If I say that’s a skeptical right?

I’m casting some doubt on what’s happening here.

I mean, obviously there’s an that means nothing.

We’re just using it as a placeholder or a filler,

But there are ums with meanings and us with meanings and so forth.

But John, I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anybody say it exactly the way that your mother and aunt do.

No, I don’t think I know that one.

Yeah, I think they’ve kind of developed this just among themselves.

So we’re kind of just, the rest of us are kind of observers into their secret little world where they’ve developed some kind of secret language.

Yeah, I was going to ask if they were really close in age or twins.

Yeah, they’re very close, two years apart.

Yeah, you’ll often find them.

They were very close growing up and remain so.

If anybody out there has this, we’ll get some emails, we’ll get some phone calls, and we’ll know whether or not it’s more widespread than your family.

So keep listening, John.

Yeah, thanks a lot, guys.

Yeah, take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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