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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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"Ah-yuh"
Read Eugene O'Neill's play, "Desire Under The Elms," for an interesting study in early New England dialect.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Ay-yuh
Northern English dialect has a similar use of Aye to signify assent - but it also has a range of inflections that carry a host of sub-texts inside them.
I have inherited the Home-Counties-cum-West-Country affirmative form of, "Oh-arr" (the further West you go, the more "rrrrr"s there are - and the longer the "Oh" lasts!) which also has a range of tonal values corresponding to different meanings.
Come to thnink of it, you can say, "yes" in a whole range of ways,can't you?
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veteran
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veteran
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I regret to say that more and more around here, you hear "No problem" as a perfunctory response to "Thank you" instead of the traditional "You're welcome". This is mostly from young people working as checkout clerks, or at fast food outlets, snowball stands, etc. I hate it.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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RE:Come to thnink of it, you can say, "yes" in a whole range of ways,can't you?
yeah, sure, (she said cynically) I find I use yeah or other words of affirmation more than Yes. Okay?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Not that different from (than?) "Think nothing of it," or "It was nothing."
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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CapK, when you reach the Southeast you'll see both "You're welcome" and "Mmm-hmmm" still in use but increasingly supplanted by "Y'all come back now, y'heah?"*
Also notice a lot more use of "sir" and "ma'am."
---
*I'm not kidding!
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Joined: Mar 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Bobyb regrets to say that more and more around here, you hear "No problem" as a perfunctory response to "Thank you" instead of the traditional "You're welcome". This is mostly from young people working as checkout clerks, or at fast food outlets, snowball stands, etc. I hate it.
I hate "no problem" as much as I do "Enjoy!" And when a waitron comes to take your plate but first asks, "Are you still working on that?" I want to stand up and scream, "this is not work!!"
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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My first encounter with "No problem" was in an article in Reader's Digest many years ago. The author heard a young man asked to do something that was going to require his making a considerable effort. His reponse was "No problem" a suffiently gracious response that it prompted the article. Unfortunately like so many once gracious reponses it has been overworked.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Another common expression in lieu of "you're welcome" in the tri-state area of my formative experience (NJ, NY, PA) is "aw, don't even think about it!"
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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In reply to:
Come to thnink of it, you can say, "yes" in a whole range of ways,can't you?
This brings to mind the (possibly apocryphal) story of an eminent professor of linguistics who at some learned gathering or other read a complex paper describing how although many languages were known where two negative words in a sentence made a positive statement, no example had ever been found of a language where two positives made a sentence negative. When he finished, and before the moderator could ask for questions, a voice was heard from the assembled lesser lights standing at the back of room: "yeah, yeah."
Bingley
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