“Whatever”获评美国人最反感口头禅

爱思英语编者按：也许你知道，这就是事实，但美国人对日常交谈中“无所谓（Whatever）”这句口头禅最为反感。本周三公布的一项由美国圣母学院开展的民调显示，47%的受访者认为这个带有漠不关心意味的流行词是“交谈中最令人讨厌的用语”。

So, you know, it is what it is, but Americans are totally annoyed by the use of "whatever" in conversations.

The popular slacker term of indifference was found "most annoying in conversation" by 47 percent of Americans surveyed in a Marist College poll released Wednesday.

"Whatever" easily beat out "you know," which especially grated a quarter of respondents. The other annoying contenders were "anyway" (at 7 percent), "it is what it is" (11 percent) and "at the end of the day" (2 percent).

"Whatever" — pronounced "WHAT"-ehv-errr" when exasperated — is an expression with staying power. Immortalized in song by Nirvana ("oh well, whatever, nevermind") in 1991, popularized by the Valley girls in "Clueless" later that decade, it is still commonly used, often by younger people.

It can be an all-purpose argument-ender or a signal of apathy. And it can really be annoying. The poll found "whatever" to be consistently disliked by Americans regardless of their race, gender, age, income or where they live.  更多信息请访问：http://www.24en.com/

"It doesn"t surprise me because "whatever" is in a special class, probably," said Michael Adams, author of "Slang: The People"s Poetry" and an associate professor of English at Indiana University. "It"s a word that — and it depends how a speaker uses it — can suggest dismissiveness."

Adams, who was not involved in the poll and is not annoyed by "whatever," points out that its use is not always negative. It also can be used in place of other, neutral phrases that have fallen out of favor, like "six of one, half dozen of the other," he said.

But the negative connotation might explain why "whatever" was judged more annoying than the ever-popular "you know," which was recently given a public workout by Caroline Kennedy during her flirtation with the New York U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Rodham Clinton. "You know," Adams notes, is a way for speakers to seek assent from others.

Pollsters at the Poughkeepsie, N.Y. college surveyed 938 US adults by telephone Aug. 3-Aug 6. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points. The five choices included were chosen by people at the poll discussing what popular words and phrases might be considered especially annoying, said spokeswoman Mary Azzoli.