This is a language-usage rant, not a drug rant. But now that you’re here…
One trend in casual language among my generation (I’m a college sophomore) that really bothers me is how “Let’s just say…” has been robbed of its meaning. It was a little tacky in the first place, but it at least left some room for creativity and ingenuity in its use, once upon a time. This is how you’re supposed to use it:
“The party was pretty wild. Jim came, and then Susan showed up, and Marcus brought all the party favors. And, well, let’s just say I was getting pretty hungry by the end of the night.”
And this is how it is used now:
“The party was pretty wild…and, well, let’s just say I smoked a bunch of weed.”
NO, you dumbfuck! You didn’t just “just say” anything, you told us EXACTLY WHAT YOU DID. Why did you even say “let’s just say” and throw in a bunch of dramatic pauses in the first place? All you did was convert useful oxygen into carbon dioxide. The decorative plants in the room will be happy, but I’m not, because I have to spend more than five seconds of my waking life with this utter tool.
The word “just” has several meanings, but in this case it means that you’re limiting what you say; you could outright say something, or you could “just say” something a little less incriminating. You can’t do both. Argh!
To be fair, it’s possible that he’s using this convention correctly, and that other variables have simply changed.
This construction is intended to coyly communicate something while eliding its overt statement, as a sort of gesture in the direction of propriety. The speaker leaves it to their audience to fill in the blanks, because some things are simply not uttered in polite society. eg: “I wouldn’t say anything against your sister’s honour, but let’s just say she’s really popular with the rugby team.”
Smoking a bunch of weed is hardly fuel for scandal amongst students. In this updated context, “Let’s just say I smoked a bunch of weed” is probably euphemism for something like “I laughed my ass off at The War at Home and then fell asleep in the middle of fucking my dog.”
Which beautiful description puts me in mind of a conversation that amused me last weekend. I was telling a friend a bawdy story about a mutual friend who’d got pregnant from a one-night stand, and finished with the words “then they had a bit of how’s-your-father, and she got up the stick”.
My friend, who was a little drunk, got quite irritated with me. “What’s all this ‘how’s your father’ business? ‘Up the stick’? Bullshit. Why not just say what you mean?!?”
“In other words, they got jiggy with it, and she ended up with a bun in the oven,” I responded.
“No, you’re doing it again,” he exclaimed angrily. “Stop with all the euphemisms.”
“Well, OK then. He inserted his penis into her vagina, and between them they moved it up and down until he ejaculated sperm, thus impregnating her.”
My friend looked truly shocked. He was silent for quite a while, then said quietly: “But… where’s the romance?”
This wasn’t an example I actually heard. I made it up to represent the similar things I have heard. In this example, smoking weed is the most scandalous thing–there is no coyness nor is there an overt statement. That’s my issue with the new usage of this form: “…But let’s just say she’s really popular with the rugby team” has been replaced with “Let’s just say she’s fucked the whole rugby team”.
You have more faith in native-born English speakers than I do. Then again, you live in Canadia. I don’t know if it’s different up there, but here in Southern California I read it as plum idiocy. As someone recently said in another thread about Paris Hilton, you can see it in their eyes–they’re not being ironic, they’re just too dumb to give more than a moment’s thought to the language they use every day. (And then there are the people who write “everyday” when they mean “every day”. Where’s that smashie smiley when we need him? I would’ve voted for that one over the “dubious” smiley any day.) Maybe it varies by region, but here people don’t even know what irony is.
There’s another word that’s blatantly misused, BTW–“Wasn’t it ironic? The light was TOTALLY green and I was already late!!! LOLOMFGROFLOLOL!!!eleven”. FUCK YOU. I’ve got some irony for you and I’ll show you where to stick it. Grr.
(The last two sentences weren’t aimed at Dopers, but rather at Californians who heard some dumb song and think they understand the word “ironic” now.)
Assuming you don’t have a problem with jumping or roofs, I urge you to look literally up in the dictionary before that rant. That usage has been in practice for nearly a century, and is now codified in most dictionaries.
To be clear (for a change,) I’m prescriptivist by nature myself and it drives me up the wall when meaning begins to shift due to people being downright lazy or ignorant about it. I think people should at least try to resist it, to try to forestall the day when our written words become incomprehensible to everyone except academics who specialize in this period.
On the other hand, drift (and even inversion) of meaning seems to be inevitable, and after a while you can’t really argue that the older meaning is the only correct one, without appearing a bit quixotic.
Good luck trying to smooth things over after telling someone that their writing is “pompous” by insisting that “It doesn’t mean that!”
In my experience, this is usually played strictly for laughs. I had a roommate who would do this all the time. He’d hem and haw, roll his eyes, look away, and generally mug heavily in the direction of trying to be as delicate and circumspect as humanly possible, and then rush through the punch line as directly and brutally as he could.
“Errr, well, let’s just, ah, y’know…ahem…saaaaaaaaaaay that she stuffed the whole goddamn thing in her vagina.”
It was great fun once or twice, when stoned off our asses.
You mean its literal meaning? I concur wholeheartedly. Just like in the case of “let’s just say”, I think most people who use “literally” this way don’t have any intent of being ironic.
But, like Larry Mudd, I feel that “literally” is a drifter.
That’s a whole different cat in a whole different box there. He’s employing many varieties of “subtlety openers” to beat around the bush, then gives up and dives straight at the point. I see where that could be pretty funny if delivered right. But the people I’m talking about don’t do that and indeed don’t show the cleverness to pull that routine off–they just throw in “let’s just say” as emphasis, without understanding what it means, because they’ve heard it a lot and it’s generalized to cover the straightforward as well as the cunningly coy…and lost its meaning.
They’re just using it figuratively. It’s a tool of emphasis. And there is rarely if ever any ambiguity to the usage, so it’s not as though it impedes meaning in any significant way. Lots of words get used figuratively. Lots of words have more than one meaning. That’s how language works. You might as well get pissed at the grass for being so goddamn green.
Poor semantics has me figuratively, and I mean figuratively, blowing a gasket, which I imagine to be engaging in an act of gasket copulation, just for emphasis!
I concur wholeheartedly. Just like in the case of “let’s just say”, I think most people who use “literally” this way don’t have any intent of being ironic.