[Ads-l] No = 'yes; truly'

[Jonathan Lighter]

Keep chewing:

VICTOR BLACKWELL: These committees are led by Republicans in both the House
and in the Senate. But Rene' was gonna come in with something.

RENE' MARSH: No, what I was gonna say is, besides all of this, I mean, you
mentioned, y' know, the White House's strategy of coming after Hillary
Clinton as... in the lead-up to all we learned about yesterday.

CNN, 8:11 am EST.

Am still confident that this weirdness is a reduction of "yeah, no."  Which
means, essentially, "yeah" in prefacing a reply to a previous speaker.

JL

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 9:23 PM, W Brewer <brewerwa at gmail.com> wrote:

> <Yes--no, ...>, maybe <So, ...>. (WB latest stray conspiracy theories):
> 1  Among the social media emerge solutions to the folkish need for an
> <<at-times-pseudo-contrastive-speaker-switching-sentence-
> initial-particle>>.
> 2  Cf. NHG <nun ja!> 'that's true enough, granted'. Probably related to
> Swedish [NAH-yah!] (Oh, come on, get real!).
> 3  Cf. Hittite <nu> 'satzeinleitende Partikel' (Pok.770 s.v. *nu(:) 'now').
> (Can this be mere coincidence?)
> 4  "I like coffee, I like tea, I like the girls and the girls like me: Yes,
> no, maybe so..." (Harvey Weinstein trips up.)
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org