A common exchange:
“Thank you”
“You’re welcome”
But what does it mean? What are you welcome to?
Other ritual responses to “Thank you” like “Don’t mention it,” “My pleasure,” “No problem,” or “Think nothing of it” have an obvious grammatical sense. But not “You’re welcome.”
The best guesses I’ve found online are it’s short for “You’re welcome to my help anytime” or “You’re welcome to ask for any other favors.”
I think you hit it in your last sentence.
“No problem” sounds jarring to me, the old guy. It sounds as if there *might have been *a problem but we somehow got past it. Why should there have been a problem?
I figure it’s a variation of “think nothing of it”. It’s letting the person who is thanking you know that doing something for him caused you no difficulties so there’s no obligation.
I see it as “it was no problem”, similar to “it was my pleasure”
If I ask a favor of you and I then thank you, “No problem” is a perfectly reasonable response. But if I buy something at a store and say “thank you” when the cashier hands my bag to me, “no problem” is a jarring response.
I’m not sure of the derivation, but it is interesting that the O.E.D. has no citation for that usage prior to 1909. I wonder what people used to say in response to “Thank you.” I’ve actually started paying attention to 18th and 19th century literature that I have been reading over the last few years, but I have not stumbled upon any examples of a response to “Thank you.”
As to “no problem,” it is pretty clearly the same idea expressed by the Spanish “de nada” (of nothing), meaning that it was not a problem for me to provide this service or gift (and you should not be embarrassed to accept it).
Because thank you implies I went out of my way. The expectation is that a clerk or whatever is going to help you with your request, but the customer says thank you anyway as a polite fiction that the clerk did them a favor, so the clerk returns the politeness by stating that it was not a problem. People who respond “Why should there have been a problem?” are A)Overthinking it and B)Undercutting the politeness of their thank you.
Welcome, of course, dates back many centuries to willa meaning desire or wish and cuma meaning guest, so one who is welcome is a guest whose presence is desired, making its role as a response to thank you more than a little eyebrow-raising.
It seems that the polite response to “thank you” always has an underlying message that minimizes the donated efforts or contribution in order to avoid imposing a reciprocal obligation on the one doing the thanking.
“Thank you” seems, in a way, to be an acknowledgment of a debt. The polite response is to decline the debt by saying “It was nothing” or “[It was] No problem” or “De nada” or “Think nothing of it”.
“You are welcome” is less literally that, but I think it can be read that way.
Perhaps it started out like this:
“Thank you.”
“Your thanks are welcome.”
Basically, you’re saying that you appreciate their gratitude.
Double post. Stupid firewall.
I think it’s a nice sentiment. YMMV.
I think it means: “You’re welcome [to whatever gift or service I just gave to you].”
Example: Neighbor brings me a bottle of wine, as a gift.
Me: Thank you.
Neighbor: You’re welcome. [to the bottle of wine]
I think “Thank you” is short for “Thank you for your help/assistance/answer to my question/etc.” so “You’re welcome” is analogously short for “You are welcome to my help, etc.” (but I could be wrong)
Here’s a cite from 1779 The London Magazine, Or, Gentleman's Monthly Intelligencer - Google Books
in which one character replies “You’re welcome” to another character who said “Thank you”
Why in the hell am I hearing “no worries!” from all of the youngsters these days? I doubt they’re all Australian.
Only indirectly. The exchange is: the husband encourages the preacher to stay for one more glass of wine; the preacher praises the food and wine, then praises the wife, thanks the couple for the offer and then says that it might be OK to stay; the wife then repeats the offer for him to stay and have food and wine with them, then says that he is welcome to their “homely fare.” In other words, she in using the word in the traditional sense of welcoming him to their table, and not as a direct response to his “thank you.”
Yeah, you’re right.
I suspect that over time the use of “You’re welcome” in response to “Thank you for your hospitality” (and similar sentiments) evolved toward the more general use of “You’re welcome” but have no cite for this.
Perhaps they are Californian, as I have been earnestly assured by several Americans that “No worries” is a Californian phrase that dates all the way back to at least the late 1980s.
There’s an interesting evolution on “good bye”. It originally was “God be with you” and it often became shortened to “God be”.
At the same time, there were various ritual greetings based on time - things like “good day,” “good night,” “good morning,” “good afternoon,” and “good evening” (all with the implied “have a…”). As a result of all these other ritual phrases that started with good, the God in “God be” got transformed into good as well and “God be” became “good bye”.
So it’s possible a similar transformation occurred in “you’re welcome” and it might have started out as a different phrase.
I think I started an actual thread on just this, when/where “no worries” came about. In my memory it sounded California/'80s, but a ton of Aussies wrote in that that they’ve been using it since the Stone Age.
Also, if you don’t like “no prob,” just switch to “no problemo.” I bet thats from California/80s, like the Terminator.