In this case, 'right?
The form for this use is coherent with the form found in the target phrase — the end of a sentence, with rising intonation, or a question mark when appearing in text. However, this interpretation presents a problem, in that it cannot serve its tag question function of clarification-seeking if the proposition it immediately follows is I know, since a speaker would not ask another interlocutor to clarify whether or not they do indeed know something that they just stated that they know.
I argue that it is this very contradiction that is the binding agent between 'I know' and 'right? This interpretation also makes sense when we consider instances of 'I know, right? A literal interpretation would force us to conclude that the speaker is incoherent and having an argumentative dialogue with him or herself. Since we know this not to be true in most cases, a new interpretation must be forged. Funnily enough, it had seemed to die down a bit in the last year in my local speech community , but I moved to North Yorkshire 6 months ago and holy cow, I hear that phrase here everywhere, all the time, by people of all ages!
March 29, 8: I'm 21 and I probably do say this. I don't consider it a totally mundane phras. It is kind of sassy and not a way I'd affirm something my boss or professor had just said. To this 50yo Californian, it seems perfectly natural and not particularly youth-oriented, though it does seem like there's a been resurgence of the phrase recently. To me, it seems older than "hella", which is also part of my idiolect, but that may be because I noticed how odd "hella" was when it entered my vocabulary, but I never noticed that "I know, right? I tend to doubt that "Mean Girls" introduced it to California , but I could easily believe that the movie helped spread it further.
As for meaning, now that I stop to think about it, it seems to be similar to "I'm glad you agree with me.
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I am 23 and I register my agreement with all of the nuances of meaning offered by those commenters above who also claim to be in their 20s. Checking down the Google hits, once you get past all the meta-, it seems like a fair number of examples are used by the same speaker, expressing the noteworthiness of a novel referent, with the predicate awesomeness, craziness, stupidity, cuteness often tacit:.
I agree with the above interpretation in this context, and I have found an interesting extension into another. When introduced with the concept of explicitly marking the completion of their proofs with "QED", students quickly employed the replacement with "IKR". What is interesting here, is that it nicely packages a mathematical proof as a nugget in an ages old conversation, where development and progress is mirrored by all of its participants. It also, by employing a meaning of "I know, right? R said, March 29, Let me tell you something about Janis Ian. We were best friends in middle school.
I more or less regarded 'I know, right? Which makes me want to pick at it being a recency illusion situation. Meangirls came out in april of In my late 40s, I find "I know, right? I employ this locution where I used to say, "Who knew?
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March 30, I use it, but almost exclusively in the shortened form that excludes the "I know" part. I wonder whether the people who have a problem with the full form also dislike the shortened one…. March 30, 3: I'm dying to know what the deal was there. IKR allows Regina to be agreeable with Cady, to provide an upgrade, and to minimize the self-indulgence of her evaluation a little bit — achieved through the implied sense of surprise that the phrase conveys. I get the feeling lately that IKR has taken on an ironic stance in some circles too. As if people have associated IKR with particular identities and are mock 'taking on' those identities, in a playful and not altogether conscious but sometimes way.
Kind of like how certain memes have their own meta-layer of irony that is communicated just by the fact of contrast between the person we know who is using the phrase and what we know about the type of person who would use the phrase. March 30, 7: March 30, 8: If you're going to "blame" movies, Clueless seems a far better candidate. I'm not a very sophisticated corpus-searcher, but from Google ngrams it looks like this was on the rise before the release of Mean Girls. Thus on the first page of the hits for , there are two instances of "I know, right?
This helps us to make our peace with the fact that if we extend the plot back to and look just at American books, we see what looks like a very different pattern … ]. March 30, 9: I won't peeve on this shortened form, but it's still odd enough to be attention-getting for me. So much so that I can say with confidence that my coworker only started using it in the last 6 months.
I remember hearing it from a Jaanese girl who had moved to the US as a teenager and being impressed that she had picked up a slangy phrase like this one.
To me age 45 it seemed completely natural in context, but I had no idea it had become recognized as a fixed expression. I find it helpful to imagine the "I know" to be a shorthand for "we have a shared mental state about this" with the "right? The vagueness of the "I know" what do you know?
The phrase, "Am I thinking what you're thinking? I hadn't really noticed this IKR expression before, but got a good example of it this evening when seeing a trailer for The Green Lantern at a cinema. March 31, 7: Can I get an amen? March 31, 8: I support the interpretation that the addition of "Right?
There's a sense of Jeremy admitting or accepting his pal's proposition and adding "Right? You're correct, but we don't need to belabor the obvious and embarrass me further, given that we're agreed on how dumb I was. Does anyone else see anything parallel to the use of "Yeah? April 1, My male, from Boston area friend and I are 28 and He will often say "Right?
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These days, his utterance is always "Right? I think there is some mutual implicit agreement that a properly intoned "Right? I gloss it in these cases as 'I agree with your claim even though I realize you are not offering hard evidence; in fact I have already had a similar thought myself'. The utterance creates a small impulse in me to re-examine whatever evidence I was using to support my claim, and to further acknowledge that even after re-examination I still believe the claim. Rather, the matter is usually one of opinion or induction from hard evidence.
The speakers are executing some joint action to reach a mutual conclusion based on whatever evidence is available. In this example, Eric is stating a simple, hard fact. The speakers aren't trying to reach a mutual opinion or inductive conclusion. Larry's last email said you'd only come up to his belly button. I don't think that's possible. I mean, I'm six feet tall. Here the speakers are trying to reach a mutual opinion about Larry's claim. Eric's first sentence is a suggestion that they should disagree with Larry.
Bob gives partial acknowledgment but doesn't fully yield the floor. Eric supports the suggestion by offering some evidence. Bob asserts that he agrees with the claim and also that he believes Eric's evidence is good support for the claim. April 2, 1: Margaret L said, March 30, 7: I mentioned "I know, huh. But that's 'seems' to be falling into disuse from my experience.
April 3, 9: I think Zoolander from popularized this phrase with my age group early 30s more so than Mean Girls. It kicks off one of the classic quotable dialogues:. And the way Hansel combs his hair… Meekus: I was making a joke. I knew it was a joke, Meekus. I just didn't get it right away. To keep the conversation from accidentally ending? April 4, 6: Thank you, Language Log, this entry alone has been worth every penny of my subscription, since it made me aware enough of the phrase to catch my daughter aged 12, London English saying "I know, right?
She couldn't tell me exactly which TV programme she had picked it up from, but apparently it's thriving among the pre-teens of the London Borough of Richmond. April 4, As mentioned earlier, this does happen often in Japanese with the sentence particles "yo" for assertions and "ne" "isn't it? April 5, 5: It seems very parallel to "deshou" or "deshou ne" in Japanese, which I think could be used in this exact same situation. April 5, Since others have already talked about Japanese "ne", "deshou ne ", etc. In this context, "huh" is said more like "ha" as in "Ha ha ha". Older and younger generations alike will often say "huh" at the end of a sentence, though.
It's like saying, "I heard he's running for president— is it true?
Sometimes people will say "You know, he is! In both uses of the word, "huh" is said like a statement, without a rising tone. Both genders use IKH, but women and girls are slightly more likely to use the second one. It's still used more or less equally between genders, though. April 17, 8: The first time I encountered this usage of "I know, right? This was in I moved to Brooklyn from Philadelphia myself upon graduating , and used to encounter the phrase coming from other NYC natives.
I'd assumed it was a regionalism. Cambridge University Press, , It does not relate to the concept of subjectification which was coined my Michel Foucault. Cornelsen, , Akademie Verlag GmbH, , Metzler, , Klassische Philologie - Latinistik - Mittel- und Neulatein. Art - History of Art. English Language and Literature Studies - Literature. BWL - Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte.
Language Log » "I know, right?"
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