“Welcome in!” Instead of “Welcome!”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Meriwether calling from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Hi, Meriwether. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Okay, I have a little bit of a query for you.

I work in film and television in the costume department.

And before and after COVID, literally two years apart,

I was working as a shopper for the costume department.

So February of 2020, I wrap a television show that I’ve been working on, and I’ve been doing all of the shopping for the costume department, going in all kinds of stores.

Everything from high-end boutiques, big box, department stores, specialty boutiques, even, you know, biker stores, sporting goods, mom and pops, everything.

And people, when you would walk in the store, they’d say, welcome to wherever.

Welcome to Banana Republic.

Welcome to REI.

Whatever.

Literally two years later, the first time back doing a similar project, I’m on a feature film, same area, and going into the usual variety of stores.

And all of a sudden, every place I go in, they’re saying welcome in.

So it’s gone from welcome to Dillard’s to welcome in.

I’ve never heard this before.

Yeah, what’s changed?

So I don’t know if you can help me, but that’s the thing.

And it’s only getting worse.

Like, it’s everywhere now.

Well, you make it sound like a different pandemic.

Yeah, exactly.

There’s a pandemic of welcome in.

It’s gone viral.

First, let me assure you that the patient is fine, that English will survive this.

It’s not going to kill the language.

Did you get a sense whether or not it was all young clerks asking this, saying welcome in?

A lot of them were young, but some of them were not.

Okay.

So it did cross different age groups.

But I would say that more of the clerks that I was encountering were young.

You know, we first got, I think we first started hearing from our listeners about this in 2016.

And I did a search on Twitter to see when I could first see people commenting on it there.

And I could see it as far back as 2014.

But people in Phoenix and Atlanta and California and other places.

But what’s really interesting is as early as 10 years ago, people were commenting that they were hearing it in Starbucks from Starbucks staff.

And Starbucks staff were saying that they are required to greet customers as they’re coming in.

I just keep wondering if there isn’t some company out there providing training or training manuals to a variety of corporations that encourage the use of the phrase welcome in instead of welcome to.

It just seems possible that just somewhere along the way there’s this company that provides this method and that’s, it could easily be explained by that.

And I don’t have anything to base this on except that it just seems possible.

Because corporate training is this unavoidable juggernaut if you’ve ever been through it.

Boy, they just really hammered into you.

Oh, I was in training for a corporation.

And there was language that was very specific, which felt unnatural.

Right.

And we enforced it to some degree.

Ultimately, it was the phrase that we were taught to encourage or require was dropped.

And this particular phrase was apartment home.

Welcome to your apartment home.

And I was like, who’s your apartment home?

And they finally just gave up because it just never, it just stuck in your mouth.

But I remember we just quit hammering it.

But it wouldn’t surprise me if there were some training element to it.

The funny thing is I’m originally from the South, and we don’t mind a long string of prepositions.

But this one.

And I would think that if anybody were to do this, like waffle out, welcome in.

You know, and you don’t hear it.

I wonder if they say it there.

Well, let me ask you if part of what is dissonant for you is because it feels like there should be an object to be welcomed to.

I mean, it’s understood that you’re welcomed into the store or the restaurant or whatever, but does it feel like they should be saying something after the in?

Welcome in, and you’re just kind of waiting for something to follow and nothing follows?

Well, I think what it is when you said welcome in the restaurant, I would say welcome into the restaurant.

Yeah.

So it feels like a little extra bit of something that doesn’t add shade of meaning.

And when I hear other prepositions strung along, they tend to add some kind of shade of meaning.

And I guess it does add emphasis, but I don’t know.

It’s just kind of cringy for me.

Well, one thing I’ll just leave you with before we go is when we have these commercial interactions,

The kind of the back and forth, hello, how are you, thank you, please, that sort of stuff,

Mostly customary and they’re almost devoid of semantic value. That is, they have almost no

Meaning except in the transaction. The transaction, the back and forth is the value and there’s no

Meaning to take away, almost no meaning. So it really doesn’t matter what they say.

They could say sherbert and that would be it. Olives. Yeah, olives. And if everybody in the

Country said olives when you walked into a store after a while, we would just say, oh yeah,

That’s what they say to you when you walk into stores, olives, because they would just be customary.

But something tells me that we’re going to hear from listeners who work in those industries and can comment on it further.

Yeah, take a photo of the page in your training manual, if that is a thing, and send it to us, because I’d love to learn whether or not that theory is correct.

Well, thank you very much.

More to come. That’s all I can say, Mary, whether more to come.

I’ll be listening.

Okay.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye, Merriweather.

We know that language changes every single day, and sometimes you notice it.

Talk to us about it.

We can explain it, or try to, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.