At the risk of sounding like some painfully feeble observational comic, I’ve noticed something lately that I’d like to get off of my chest.
Is an uptalked “Right?” the new “Y’know”? Or maybe the white girl’s “A’ight”? I first heard a chick I work with insert “Right?” at least three times into conversations in which she wasn’t looking for confirmation or approval. Example:
Me: I’ve heard that Interpol are amazing live.
Too-cool-for-school coworker: I know, right? I’ve seen them twice.
Last night I rented and watched “Mean Girls” (speaking of chests) while D. was at rehearsal — I caught at least one character inserting a superfluous “Right?”. And in someone’s blog today, the author agreed with a commenter by saying “Right? That’s what blahdy-blah is for.”
Uptalk is bad enough without sticking useless interrogatives in, too.
Jersey girls have been saying “Right?” as shorthand for, “I ruefully agree, I too have lived this experience,” since for-ev-ah! My sibs and I started saying it ironically (although it’s really pronounced, “Chhh-right?”), and, as will happen, it took on a life of its own and stopped being ironic and just shorthand for, y’know, “I ruefully agree.” Same thing happened with “AWE-some!” Word.
Amiable, I have a news flash, right? Remember when you were talking about filmstrips? We just got a new book in called Change Your Underwear Twice a Week: Lessons form the Golden Age of Classroom Filmstrips. Sadly, it doesn’t discuss the Dewey Decimal System filmstrip, but it’s surely worth tracking down anyway, right? If not at your local library (it’s at mine, but the OCLC record lists only Simmons College as holding it in the great state of MA), it can be found at such places as this.
Was this a recent post I missed? If you’re talking about the film strip with the creature with a sort of lightbulb in his butt, I too would love to revisit those.
Thanks, Jannie! I’ll have to check that out.
An aside: I think I’m going to start saying “OCLC” to mean “so-so,” “etsi-getsi,” “comme çi, comme ça,” “mezzo-mezzo,” that kind of thing. Who’s with me?
As long as you’re not surprised when people start looking around for the nearby cow you’re apparently indicating. (Uh, what’s “OCLC” if I’m not so terribly uncool not knowing?)
Dude! I should let the Uber-Librarian answer, but in case she’s busy helping a patron:
http://www.oclc.org/default.htm
I think I’m going to start saying “OCLC” to mean “so-so,” “etsi-getsi,” “comme çi, comme ça,” “mezzo-mezzo,” that kind of thing. Who’s with me?
Me! What a great idea. Problem is, OCLC is six miles down the road and dominates much of our institutional life; it’ll be hard to successfully genericize the name and give it a peculiar new meaning. But it frkn lilts, so I’m'a try it.
Maybe the whole “Right?” thing is part of the Right Wing Conspiracy? Right?
Wow, I’m not even making *myself* laugh these days…
I don’t know what I’m taken more aback by, the gratuitous “right?” ms. editrixie describes here, or the fact that such interjections have spawned their own technical term, “uptalk(ed).” Yuck to both.
I can’t believe this but the day after I read your entry, someone in a professional meeting I was in started spouting off “Rights” right and left!
My fear? IM shorthand becomes common language:
Someone cracks a joke.
Your response: “LOL”
Or, “You should do it this way, imho.”