I’ve been trying with little success to ferret out the expression “yeah, no” from the start of what seems like half the sentences I utter.

Worse, 100 percent of the people I speak to, at least in L.A., are similarly stricken.

WTF?

Turns out the ubiquitous throat-clearer is yet another cultural plague inflicted by those stalwarts who gave us Veg-a-Mite, the Bee Gees and, via export-import, Mel Gibson.

The phrase apparently was popular among Australian footballers and subsequently infected an entire unwitting continent.

According the Aussie newspaper The Age:

In Australia, where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, “yeah no” can mean anything from “yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic” to an enthusiastic “yes, I can’t reinforce that point enough.”

The paper quotes Kate Burridge, a linguistics expert who actually co-authored “Yeah-No, He’s a Good Kid: A Discourse Analysis of Yeah-No in Australian English”:

“It’s not going to disappear. It’s always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase.”

Great. Given that the article was published two years ago, the casual evidence since would suggest she was correct.

Fortunately, Los Angeles has totally never been a source of, y’know, annoying verbal tics, right dude?

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 8:35 am and is filed under Yeah No. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.