What. Ever.
Not one, but two four-letter words that, when combined, are guaranteed to drive the parents of sullen teens and precociously annoying preteens absolutely hopping-up-and-down, how-have-I-spawned-such-awful-offspring nuts.
"Honey, would you like a piece of mom's homemade, four-cheese, piping hot lasagna?"
"Whatever."
"Didn't I ask you to pick up your socks yesterday?"
"Whatever."
"Just tell me: Was it a fender bender, or is the car totaled?"
"Whatever."
Whatever? Why not just say it the old-fashioned way? "Go jump in the lake, ma!" "Stick it in your ear, pops!" Or even that hoary chestnut, "It's none of your business! I hate you! I wish Shelly's parents were my parents! They're cool."
"Whatever" is, quite simply, Generation Y's smart bomb, the noncommittal reply programmed to find the soft underbelly of parental forbearance and explode on contact. And it works just fine on non-parents, too.
The other day, I asked my neighbor's 10-year-old if he wanted to go with us for ice cream. He replied (eyes rolled to some fascinating spot on the ceiling), "Whatever," thereby rendering me about as eager to buy him a sundae as I'd be to fund his college education.
"It is a big problem here," acknowledges Suzanne Gibbons-Neff, a traumatized mom of two teen-age sons in Connecticut. "When you're trying to have an in-depth conversation with them and they don't want to deal with it, instead of saying, 'You're right' or 'I understand,' they'll just say, 'Whatever."'
Or at least they did. Now Gibbons-Neff fines her boys a buck for each "W," because to her it's as if they'd used an obscenity.
"It drives me crazy when my 7-year-old says that," says Mom No. 2, Carol Gifford, who lives outside Philadelphia. "I was disciplining her the other day about talking to strangers, and she's not paying attention, so I say, 'Do you hear what I'm saying?' And she says, 'Whatever.' Whatever? What do you mean? Say, 'Yes!' Say, 'I won't do it again!"'
But no. "Whatever" is this generation's final answer. And what makes it even more apoplexy-inducing is that "whatever" users always have an alibi: "Hey! It's not like I said something bad. I was agreeing with you!"
Yeah. And "Yeah" means I really believe what you just said.
As infuriating as "whatever" sounds especially accompanied by the traditional snort, shrug or smirk its aggravation quotient doubles when your underage conversation partner touches his/her thumbs back to back and points the forefingers upward up to form a giant "W."
Hey, gang why not save yourselves some major digital effort and just raise one single, towering finger? That's what you really mean to say, right? Right?
To back me up, I called Mike Agnes, editor in chief of the Webster's New World Dictionaries.
"Oh, Lenore, you are so very right, indeed!" he said (in not so many words). To the traditional meaning of "whatever," Agnes averred, "the spin of dismissal has been added. As in, 'I'm not interested in your theories or your litany of accusations. Let's move on to another topic."'
Topic? If only! I'm ready to move to another planet. This one is just too insulting. Irritating.
Whatever.
Lenore Skenazy's e-mail address is lskenazy@edit.nydailynews.com.
No comments
Commenting is turned off for this story.