[BigV]

"No, totally!"



It's here, it's a thing, it's growing. *sigh*

Some excerpts from the article:

In certain situations, it seems, we have started using “no” to mean “yes.”

Here’s Lena Dunham demonstrating this development, during a conversation with the comedian Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF.” The two are talking about people who reflexively disparage modern art:

MARON: They can look at any painting and go, “Eh.” They can look at a Rothko and go, “Hey, three colors.” And then you want to hit them.
DUNHAM: No, totally.

“No, totally.” “No, definitely.” “No, exactly.” “No, yes.” These curious uses turn “no” into a kind of contranym: a word that can function as its own opposite. Out of the million-odd words in the English language, perhaps a hundred have this property. You can seed a field, in which case you are adding seeds, or seed a grape, in which case you are subtracting them. You can be in a fix but find a fix for it. You can alight from a horse to observe a butterfly alighting on a flower.

Such words—also called auto-antonyms, antagonyms, Janus words, and antiologies—can arise for different reasons. Some are just a special kind of homonym; what appears to be one word with two opposite meanings is really two different words with identical spellings and pronunciations.

and...

Until the end of the sixteenth century or thereabouts, English had a tidier solution to this problem: we had two words for “no,” which we used in distinct ways. Those two words formed half of what’s called a four-form system of negation and affirmation. If you speak French (or, in a statistical unlikelihood, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic), you are familiar with a three-form system: in French, non can negate anything, oui is used only in response to positively phrased questions or statements, while si is used to contradict questions or statements phrased in the negative. In Franglish:

Would you like to have dinner with me on Friday?
Oui, I’d like that very much.

You don’t like the cilantro pesto I made?
Si, it’s delicious!

Back when English was a four-form system, it, too, had a si—a word used specifically to contradict negative statements. That word was “yes.” To affirm positive statements, you used “yea”:

Shoot, there aren’t any open pubs in Canterbury at this hour.
Yes, there are.

Is Chaucer drunk?
Yea, and passed out on the table.

Similarly, “nay” was used to respond to positive statements or questions, while “no” was reserved for contradicting anything phrased in the negative:

Is the Tabard open?
Nay, it closed at midnight.

Isn’t Chaucer meeting us here?
No, he went home to bed.

Over time, the distinction withered, “yea” and “nay” became obsolete, and “yes” and “no”—the words that started out as special cases, for responding exclusively to negatives—came to hold their current status. Or, as the case may be, statuses.