Social Media Whatnot

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Peter Smith from San Diego.

Hiya, Peter. Welcome to the show.

Hey there, what’s up? How can we help?

Hey, my question is about the word whatnot.

My sister uses this word, and the way that she uses it is like a filler, or she’ll say something like, I went to the store and I had to get some stuff and whatnot. It doesn’t have any meaning for me.

Yeah.

And it’s a weird construction.

How old is your sister?

She is 49.

49? Oh, wow. I was expecting her to be much younger.

Does she hang around with a lot of young people?

She has kids.

Are they in their teens, perhaps?

Yes.

Okay, very good. Good, good, good.

This is a little more conforming to my theory here about whatnot. You are not the first person to ask us about whatnot. We have numerous emails and numerous phone calls over the last… well, since 2007, people have asked us about what they believe to be a sudden resurgence in the use of this term.

And you can look in the databases like the corpora and Google Engrams, and you can see that whatnot kind of bottomed out in the 1980s in terms of usage, at least in print, and then started rising again and continues to rise in usage.

And there’s another thing happening here. In order to kind of track it more recently, say the last 10 years or so, you can search in Twitter and Urban Dictionary and a few other places and start to see people reacting against what they perceive to be the overuse of whatnot.

Like you.

Yeah.

So you’ll see them peeving about it or complaining that the word is empty and meaningless.

All of these people reporting to us that they’re overhearing whatnot and the database is showing that there’s a resurgence in the term in print and the rise of peeving.

The thing is that when I see people complaining about a word, I don’t really care much that they’re upset about the word. I try to dissuade them.

What I care about is their peeving about it means that something is actually happening there.

And I think so. I think you’re on to something, Peter. She’s probably caught this word from her children.

It does tend to be heavily skewed towards young women.

Interesting.

Yeah, I don’t know how it came about that it was resurgent. I don’t know if it was in a book or a movie or influential television show. I don’t know.

But more with young women, did you say?

Yeah, a little more with young women, yeah.

Huh.

As far as I can tell, this stuff is really hard to track.

One interesting thing is I was searching Twitter to find people’s reactions to the use of whatnot and to see people commenting on whatnot as a word rather than just using it.

I came across this great tweet from Twitter user Amy Hoy. She wrote in October of 2010, she said, you can’t sound like a badass if you use the word whatnot. It’s granny panties for your vocabulary.

I love that.

That’s great.

And I think Amy Hoy nailed it.

Because it’s an old-fashioned sounding word. It’s weird to me to hear like this vivacious, well-educated 22-year-old young woman who is like completely in charge of her life throw out this words that sounds like it should be from an 1890 Victorian novel.

You know?

It’s crazy to me.

It’s bloomers.

Does that sum up your feelings about it, Peter?

I think Granny Patties is totally what it is.

Yes, indeed.

Thank you, Grant.

I think you nailed it.

We’re glad we could help, Peter.

So, yes, your instincts are correct, and it’s resurgent.

I don’t think that you’re going to have any luck in getting her not to say it. She’ll grow weary of saying it after a while, and whatnot will fade back into history as it did once before.

Hopefully sooner than later.

All right, thanks.

Thank you.

All right, sure. Bye-bye.

We’re happy to talk with you about language and so forth and so on.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.