Whatever
LIKE, WHATEVER
(Whatever your age or attitude, the W-word is taking hold)
(c) David Astle
Hold the phone. Russell Crowe may have a case of justifiable rage. That early-morning tantrum in New York three months ago, hurling a phone across the Mercer Hotel’s foyer and clocking the concierge along the way, could well have a perfectly sound reason.
To recap the brouhaha, on June 7 at 4AM Soho time, Rusty tried to call his wife Danielle Spencer and son Charlie in Sydney but couldn’t get a line. When he contacted reception, Mercer employee Nestor “Josh” Estrada was less than amenable, according to reports in the New York Post. When the actor complained about his dicky phone, the concierge allegedly let slip The W Word.
Any teacher, negotiator, commuter, interviewer, retailer, counseller, filmgoer, teen or parent of teens knows that word well. Perhaps too well. I speak of the word “whatever” and all its manifestations. Just as words like ”cool” or “crazy” can capture the spirit of the beatnik movement, “whatever” is the watchword of Generation Y (or whatever generation we happen to be up to).
Crowe, as we know, flipped. According to the New York Post, as soon as the concierge mumbled “whatever” in reply to the gladiator’s beef, Maximus went from Bilius to Furius.
”What’s your name?” asked Crowe.
“Josh,” said Josh.
“Well, Josh, I’m coming down right now to kick your ass.”
Or cut his cheek with a phone anyway. And throw a lobby vase, bow to the in-house cameras and stand frozen in a karate pose until New York’s finest arrived.
Crowe later described the brain snap as “spectacularly stupid”, and a sorry mix of “jet lag, loneliness and adrenalin”. Though now, thanks to these latest reports from the Big Apple, we can add a fourth trigger: whatever.
Whatever – the word – can be the naked flame to the kindling of human discourse. Such hasn’t always been so. For centuries, in fact, whatever has kept a low, inoffensive profile. (“Whatever you do,” goes the proverb, “let it be done with prudence.”) Essentially the word means this-that-or-the-other, a choice that’s commonly thrown open to the listener. Neither polite nor rude in its early uses, ye olde whatever could be dubbed general at best – and vague at worst. Lately however, whatever has picked up attitude and modern dictionaries have mapped the trend.
In the fifth Australian Edition of the Collins Dictionary, published last year, whatever gained a telling seventh definition since the last edition in 1998. The first six meanings are business as usual: everything or anything; an intensive “what”; a thingummybob; absolutely etc. The latest arrival? “Informal – an expression used to show indifference or dismissal.”
You know the scenario. The eloquent sigh that comes with the word. The stagey exasperaion, the eye-roll, the toxic pout. Imagine you ask your P-plate daughter to return the car by midnight and Cinderella retorts: Whatever. You tell the waiter the ambient music is too loud and garcon rejoins: Whatever. You confide in your housemate a minor office crisis and they sling “whatever” over their shoulder.
On-line, where dictionaries exist in molten form, whatever has been billed by Houston’s Rice University Linguistics Department as a verb meaning to blank or ignore, such as in the context of “The guy really whatevers me.” Or possibly, “On being whatevered by the bellhop, the A-list celebrity blew a gasket.”
Ten years ago, Alicia Silverstone catapulted the word into popular culture as Cher Horowitz in the movie Clueless. Not only did the teen queen lend that final syllable a distinctive Beverly Hills’ burr, she also shaped her hands to mimic two pistols nuzzling (the manual W to signal the word), much as the thumb and pointer stand for Loser in equivalent chick-flicks.
In the same era, Patsy Stone, the care-proof vamp played by Joanna Lumley in Absolutely Fabulous, spent most episodes cutting off others’ remarks with a caustic, “Oh whatever sweetie.” More recently, in the teen-soap The OC, viewers could well take side-bets over which character – Seth or Summer – would deliver the most whatevers before the late-night news.
Sensing a revolution, songwriter Ben Folds penned the song The Battle of Who Could Care Less, a feature track on his 1997 album, Whatever And Ever Amen. Across the Atlantic, Oasis peeled things back further with their hit Whatever off the Whatever EP. Meantime musician-cum-comic Liam Lynch ruled the airwaves in 2002 with his “yoof” spoof, The United States Of Whatever, a song less given to dancing than shrugging.
Apathy often lies at the heart of most whatevers, though that’s putting things too simply. The more you study this outbreak the more you see how versatile the word can be. “I see the word everywhere,” says Sydney psychologist, Carl Nielsen, especially among his younger clients. Nielsen’s practice in Double Bay regularly deals with self-esteem issues among teenagers.
“Quite often, rather than communicating, people just want to be right,” he says. “My opinion is right and yours is wrong. When someone says something that doesn’t fit in my opinion, I’ll go. ‘Whatever’, because that’s wrong in my world.”
Hardly apathy then. More like the superego in action. (Such as “The cop-guy says you can’t text while you drive and I’m like, ‘Whatever.’”) But that’s just one function. Unlike many words, “whatever” can betray our emotional state by its multiple nuances in tone. At times defiant, or apathetic, the same word can be resigned, or aloof.
“I’m not going to let anybody in,” as Nielsen portrays it. “I’m scared to show what really hurts me – so ‘whatever’ is a barrier. If people are trying to elicit a response in you or trying to hurt you emotionally, a great way to cut them off is by being aloof.” By quoting the Gospel According To Whatever.
Or we resign ourselves to unwelcome fates. A symptom of impotence, “whatever” can as easily express defeatism, whether it’s teenagers facing adult rules or us in the grip of bureaucracy.
“It’s a form of learned helplessness,” says Nielsen, a former tennis champ who’s seen both grit and surrender on the court. “If we get a good mark or perform well in a sport, we attach self-worth to what we do. But if we don’t get the result we want, we can resign from the effort. It protects our own belief system. I tried before and it didn’t work. I tried before that and I couldn’t do it – so that must mean it will happen again in the future. So we go, ‘Whatever’.”
New York poet Maggie Balistreri calls “whatever” the Fonzie of evasions. Adored by teens, it’s the mumble with the mostest. In her book The Evasion English Dictionary, Balistreri identifies no less than 11 functions of “whatever” from the muted oath to the pseudo-impartial (see list below).
Just like “like”, the other teenage twitch and multi-purpose word, “whatever” can be tasked with occupying inarticulate gaps (“He’s studying design and whatever”), softening poignancy (“I was struggling with inner demons and whatever”), flagging envy (“She won the gymkhana two years running. Whatever”) or striking that passive-aggressive pose (“They say I’m insolent. Whatever”), which sometimes lacks the least grain of passivity.
This year the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne has enshrined the word in their fund-raising drive. Instead of red noses, pink ribbons or shaved policemen, the hospital has thrown up its hands – or rolled its eyes – and opted for a no-gimmick gimmick. Kind souls are invited to organise their own trivia nights, art auction or walkathon…. Revenue raised will go towards the hospital, all in the name of Whatever Day. Try the campaign’s own www.whateverday.com.au to see how the philanthropic “what” of the hospital’s “whatever” is up to you.
Whatever its uses, from ego to agro, from dropping out to ducking the issue, whatever is the word of a generation (though many of we wiser types are also falling into its spell).
Perhaps the W-plague is best captured by the Washington Post. Ten years ago the paper ran a list of worst analogies drawn from a high-school essay contest. Among the winners was a stand-out: “Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.”
THE WHATEVER XI
[Source: The Evasion-English Dictionary by Maggie Balistreri, Melville House, 2003]
Apathetic Whatever (translation – Yeah, so): Oh, I’m immature? Whatever.
Pseudo-Impartial Whatever (Who am I to judge?): She’s dating the boss. Whatever.
Self-Pitying Whatever (Why am I always the martyr?): Never mind I did all the work but whatever.
Slow Thaw Whatever (OK but I’m gonna sulk): Him: I’m sorry. Let’s have dinner. Her: Whatever.
Emotion Kibosh Whatever (Get over it): Dad, whatever, it’s just a tattoo.
Evasion Evader Whatever (I’ll see you an evasion and raise you one): So now she’s mad at me. Whatever.
Jealous Whatever (Lucky so-and-so): His uncle got him the job but whatever.
Minced Oath (F*** you): Her: This kitchen is a pit. Him: Whatever.
Faltering Cliché Whatever (Let’s skip the psychobabble hey): That way you can get closure or whatever.
Bashful Whatever (Oops. Emotion. Sorry): I just feel such total love or whatever.
Doubting Thomas Whatever (Liar, liar, pants on fire): He said he lost my phone number and I’m like whatever.
[Sunday Life, September, 2005]