Yeah-No
YEAH, NO, LIKE, TOTALLY
(The new epidemic in Australian speech)
(c) David Astle
Don’t look now, but there’s a woman in the corner who’s listening to your every word. She may look familiar, but you don’t know her. She’s sits by herself, a cold coffee at her elbow, writing a shopping list in a small pocketbook. At least you think so. But instead of scribbling MILK EGGS DENTAL FLOSS she’s taking note of your resumptive topic markers.
Your what? Don’t panic. They’re not toxic – but they are contagious. You may know them best as the yeah-no habit. (‘You know what I mean?’ ‘Yeah, no, I’m with you now.’) Whether you use yeah-no to pick up loose threads, or hedge a response, or just out of habit, this weird little paradox infests our chat. In the name of research I sat through a few random hours of TV. Here’s a sample from Good Morning Australia, recorded on July 30 this year:
Bert Newton: You couldn’t lend me a few bob, could you?
Trev Butler (million-dollar winner of Big Brother 3): Yeah I can.
Bert: You’re traveling well now, eh?
Trev: Yeah, no, I’m doing alright.
On the same show Bert locked horns with impresario Mike Walsh, two of this land’s most illustrious chat-show hosts. Here’s a bit of the repartee:
Bert: Was it always going to be showbiz for you, Mike? I know that you’re a qualified pharmacist.
Mike: Yeah, yeah, but no, showbiz was always my thing.
And before we start blaming Bert for all things yeah-no, take a peek at Neighbours on the same week, scripted no less:
Susan Kennedy: Have a nice time with Darren last night?
Lib Kennedy (daughter): What does that mean?
Susan: I just saw you at the pub together.
Lib: Oh yeah, yeah, no that was alright. It was just a quiet one.
Susan (motherly pause): Oh, quiet one was it?
Lib: Yeah, no, I must be getting old.
Old or young, we all succumb to the yeah-no combo. Most of us say it without realizing the marker is passing our lips. Shopping malls, dinner parties, pubs and playgrounds: the cluster can crop up anywhere, and fulfil several meanings.
Earliest outbreaks were noted at the post-match interview, where team-speak will prompt a football player to deflect personal credit. (‘You had a blinder,’ gushes the reporter, and the player retorts, ‘Yeah, no, we toughed it out.’) The Trev example above fits into the same groove, though the fad is mutating as we speak.
Kate Burridge and Margaret Florey, prime suspects when it comes to eavesdropping, run the linguistics department at Monash University in Melbourne. This year the pair co-wrote a pioneer study on those two little words, Yeah-No He’s A Good Kid. The paper owes its origins to a few weeks in 1998, when Kate and Margaret attended a convention of linguists (‘Conjunction is a better word,’ laughs Kate) in Brisbane.
‘We were staying at college,’ explains Margaret, herself an expert in vanishing languages of northern Australia and Indonesia, ‘a couple of weeks surrounded by linguists, so it was a marvelous laboratory for preliminary investigation….’
‘A pilot study,’ says Kate, a savant on Amish German, and Dutch cuss-words. ‘We were listening to conversations in buses. We both had notebooks….’
As good friends, the two ‘word doctors’ frequently finish each other’s sentences. In academia the rhythm is known as ‘collaborative overlapping’. Seasoned spouses do it all the time, or long-time mates reviving a mutual yarn. Kate labels such coziness, verbal cuddling, or a conversational duet: a proven source of the yeah-no virus. The Bert & Mike patter is a prime example.
‘Anglo culture operates with the idea of harmony in mind,’ reads the research paper, ‘with a strong preference for agreement and compromise.’ We like to agree with each other. Failing that, we will agree to disagree. Nobody wants a scene, a clash, or loss of face, which summons yeah-no to the rescue – a weak agreement, or softened dissent. At least that’s one guise. The breakdown below embraces half a dozen yeah-no roles:
Propositional: where you agree, and disagree. (‘Yeah, no, the movie was okay.’) Sometimes the marker can embody a genuine two-part response, such as yes (I heard your question) and no (the movie wasn’t the best).
Textual: a link or fluency device, often a signal to a previous topic. (‘Yeah, no, my mum’s going real well. Thanks for asking.’)
Personal: a hedge, or face-saver, that muffles bad news, or aims to reduce a comment’s force. (‘Yeah, no, we should be finished a month late.’ Or ‘Yeah, no, the food wasn’t much chop.’)
The squelch is another scenario, where a reticent topic may end with a yeah-no as a coded warning against further discussion. Elsewhere, yes-no is emphatic. (‘Yes, no, The Producers was fantastic!’ not to be confused with ‘Yes, no, The Producers was fun’ which is a hedge, or a downplay.)
Confused? Yes and no. That’s why this epidemic is so intriguing. Most of its sufferers (read you and me) may utter the pairing without consciously, or explicitly, knowing why.
‘Things typically become more abstract in meaning over time,’ says Dr Burridge. ‘There was one yeah-no example (two men discussing banks at a barbecue) we studied that had three or four possible interpretations, and possibly all at once. Yeah-no can kind of coincide its meanings.’
As raw material, Florey and Burridge based their paper on 10 hours of people gabbing on the Central Coast of NSW, the family and friends of linguistics students at Newcastle University, back in 1998. The subjects jawed at kitchen tables, cricket games, tucked in bed, aware of the microphone, but not the study’s focal point.
On top of this, the authors swotted SeaChange episodes from ABC TV, Front Up interviews on SBS with Andrew Urban, sports shows, and supplementary chinwags to fill in the age gaps of the Newcastle archive. The upshot was 20 dense pages on a fickle, subtle marker loved by all ages, both genders.
American linguist, Pamela Fishman, believes women have a history of ‘conversational shitwork’, the slog of keeping dialogue afloat. Studies show men are less likely to pick up the verbal slack, though it seems the yeah-no custom is a unisex tic.
Dr Florey adds, ‘You’d expect women to use more yeah-nos in its function of keeping conversation flowing, and we didn’t find that.’ Seems blokes are just as comfy with the marker.
One bias, however, is the cluster’s Australian-ness. ‘Germans have ja-nein,’ says Kate, ‘and Afrikaans, ya-nay, but the [overseas] examples tend to be more literal. They don’t have the same variations.’
(Take, for example, the clear hedge of a Fawlty Towers guest sitting at Basil’s bar – ‘yeah, no, make it a double’ – or the stammer slapstick of Jim Trott in Vicar of Dibley – ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes…no.’)
‘For once we can’t blame the Americans for it!’ chimes in Margaret. ‘It’s one of those things that has moved from Australian to American English rather than the other way round.’
Scattergun evidence supports the claim, with most US examples post-dating that flight to Brizzie. In Kissing Jessica Stein, a 2001 movie, the topic is yoga. Does Jessica do bikram? ‘Oh god, yeah, no, you know… I don’t think I could sit still that long and breathe. I think I’d panic.’
Panic seems implicit in the words of Lawrence DiRita, a Pentagon spokesperson caught in the crossfire of a blood-thirsty press conference, on July 14 this year:
Press: Senator Rockefeller is raising that question.
DiRita: Yeah. No, no…
Press: In fact, in response to a letter from the Pentagon —
DiRita: Right.
Press: …he specifically said that, you know, he’s not apologizing…
DiRita: Yeah. No, no. And I….whether he…
As Australians, the greatest practitioners of the yeah-no craft, we don’t need to apologise for our funny way of speaking. In one sense, yeah-no does that for us already. In another, the marker boosts our idiom’s stocks.
‘Far from speech junk,’ say the doctors in unison, ‘yeah-no indicates the richness of our language. This is what gives our language its identity, and its feeling, and really moves away from a very, dry standard Australian English.’ Of course, you can agree to disagree.
[Sunday Life, August 2004]