Today was the umpteenth time I saw someone on these boards use “yanno” for “You know”. This pisses me off. I’m not from the States and to me “yanno” looks like it should be pronounced with a short “a” and not a “schwa”, so it sounds like the name of some Greek sheep herder or something, and it just screws up my parsing of any posts using “yanno”.
So cut that crap out right now.
And while I’m at it: it’s not a “sammich” or “mmmkay” either. You should all be shot! (PS. I’m German, so your internal voice should say that with the appropriate bad Nazi accent!)
It’s just a way of representing the word as hastily pronounced by some people. English was already chock-full of example before “sammich” came along. What about “gonna”, “gimme”, “hafta”, “gotta”, and so on? ‘Sammich’ is likely used more when the person is going for a humorously juvenile affect.
German actually has the same sort of orthographical tricks; sometimes in stories you’ll read “ham” instead of “haben” (have); there are other similar examples which I can’t remember now.
Yeah, there’s a lot of people going for a humorously juvenile effect. It’s not really all that humorous, though it certainly is juvenile. I just don’t like these cutesy unnecessary literal spellings - especially since, while “sammich” is apparently used in some dialects, the use of the term on the internet (and around here in particular) seems to be far more common than its use in real life. And the distinction between “sandwich” and “sammich” (one apparently being a better food than the other) is something that I’m quite certain doesn’t exist in real life. It’s a sickeningly cutesy affectation used only on the internet (I dread the day people start deliberately incorporating this baby-talk sounding word into their speech).
“Yanno” is even worse, since its spelling doesn’t (as people have pointed out) actually suggest the pronounciation of the word. Everyone knows that “you know” is pronounced /j@ 'nou/ - it’s pronounced that way and exclusively that way as far as I’ve ever heard in any but the most carefully articulated speech. “Yanno” is completely unnecessary, since we already know how you pronounce “you know”. Comparing it to established usages like “gonna” and “gimme” is ridiculous, as (1) those are well-established spellings and (2) they exist for the purpose of distinguishing a casual usage from a formal one. “Yanno” serves no purpose that way, since it’s a confusing and far from well-established spelling, and there is no distinction to be made between different registers in the pronunciation of “you know”. If you need some spelling to play up just how oh-so-casual you are, you can use the long-established “ya” for “you”, but there’s little point in doing that either.
I just find these cutesy internetisms annoying. They’re distracting, they’re excessively precious, and they’re hard to read. Some internet acronyms are useful (though they sure get overused as well) but these internet spellings are hard to read, overly cute, and they betray that the user spends far too much time on the internet picking up specialized spellings.
I was horrified the day I realized I said sammich (and it takes a lot to horrify me), but now I say it and write it because it annoys a few people I know… and some people I don’t know.
