"yeah, yeah" again (another version)

[Jonathan Lighter]

Some might argue that three positives become a positive again:

"She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah,
She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah..."

In my experience, however, "Yeah, yeah, yeah!" is just as likely to be
negative, or at least sarcastic:

Mom: "How many times have I told you to clean up your room?"

Pre-teen: "Yeah, yeah, yeah!"

Perhaps the song is bitterly ironic. Surely the unresolvable tension
between the two equally privileged interpretations lay behind its great
popularity in the confrontational days of the so-called "Cold War."

JL

On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 4:02 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: "yeah, yeah" again (another version)
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Jul 21, 2012, at 2:01 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>
> > Where's the Yiddish inflection in "Yeah, yeah"?
> >
> > JL
>
> It's got to be added, as something you bring to the party.  I assume it
> would be something like 'sarcastic, New-Yorky, know-it-all-heard-it-all'.
>  Imagine Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, or one of their comic ancestors (or
> descendants, if that's different).   Still easier to imagine than
> Morgenbesser actually saying "Yeah, yeah" in Yiddish.
>
>
> LH
> >
> > On Sat, Jul 21, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu
> >wrote:
> >
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> >> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> >> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> >> Subject:      Re: "yeah, yeah" again (another version)
> >>
> >>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >>
> >> On Jul 21, 2012, at 12:25 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> >>
> >>> Garson O'Toole wrote, quoting from an MIT Press book:
> >>>> the philosopher Sidney Morgenbesser, shout from the back of the room
> >>>> in rich Yiddish: "Yeah, yeah?"
> >>>
> >>> What is the rich Yiddish?  I want to employ it when appropriate, with
> >>> varying intonations as appropriate.
> >>>
> >> Well, in the possible (but not actual world) in which Chomsky spoke at
> >> some (possible but not actual) talk about double negation at Columbia
> >> (extremely unlikely), Morgenbesser's putative comeback was, I think,
> >> supposed to be in rich Yiddish-inflected English rather than Yiddish,
> but
> >> youneverknow.  I'm not sure what the Yinglish is for "Yeah, yeah";
> maybe it
> >> just comes out in the inflection and the eyebrows.  Probably similar to
> the
> >> rich Yiddish-inflected Danish that Morgenbesser used when Otto Jespersen
> >> was talking about double negation at a public lecture sometime in the
> 1930s.
> >>
> >> LH
> >>
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