2020-10-21
16 分钟Coming up on Word Matters, your questions.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea,
Peter Sakalowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
This one's all about you, dear listener, or at least your questions.
On each episode,
we encourage listeners to email us at wordmatters.m-w.com with any language-related questions,
complaints, or observations they want to share.
We've received a wide array of such missives and thought we'd spend some time today addressing a few of them.
Amon Shea has our first question.
We're starting with a letter from James Callan.
who is writing in about no problem and he writes,
I'm 50 and I seem to be right on the dividing line between older people who hate this reply to thank you and younger people who find it completely unexceptional and don't use your welcome.
Why is your welcome falling out of favor and why is no problem the most common replacement?
One of the things that's interesting about this is that, you know,
well obviously language changes and the things that we get upset about change and the way that we respond to things change.
And no problem is perhaps among the more common responses to thank you right now,
but it's not the first or the only one.
We do have evidence going back to the 18th century where people used to say,
don't mention it in response to thank you.