About 20 minutes into the fifth episode of the second season of “The White Lotus” — when Alex describes his old friend Cameron’s tendency to seduce women Alex was interested in — Cameron’s wife, Daphne, responds in playful indignation with a single word: “Rude!” Except she stretches it out into two syllables: “Rude-uh!” or perhaps “Ru-duh!” That extra syllable goes by quickly, but it does a lot of work. It suggests a level of self-awareness, a knowing manipulation of diction and tone to produce an exact meaning and, beyond that, an exact vibe.
You’ve probably heard people in real life — generally under 40, usually women — adding “-uh!” to words and sentences that way, as a kind of verbal exclamation point. A reader, Dan Featherston, sent me this great bit of video, in which police officers are summoned to remove a young woman from a restaurant bathroom. “Do not come back on this property. You’re trespassed,” one of the officers says. “How-uh?” she replies with perfect sullen irritation.
I became aware of this in 2015, when I overheard someone ask a college student how her summer had been. “Good-uh!” she replied. I wondered why she had exclaimed in that particular way. But once I noticed that intonation, I realized I was hearing it everywhere — from people in real life and on the radio and actors in film, television and theater.
It turns out it’s been around for a while. I’ve heard from readers that “No-uh!” has been common among kids for decades, and I wouldn’t be surprised if even longer. Perhaps young Grover Cleveland replied, “No-uh!” when someone tried to give him castor oil for a tummy ache. Was George Washington, asked if he had chopped down that apocryphal cherry tree, tempted to say, “No-uh!”? We may never know. But by the 2010s, that quasi-suffix had expanded its reach well beyond “No.” It really caught on, and here we are.
As is often the case, women led the way. Scholars of the academic specialty known as variationist sociolinguistics have found that across cultures, women are more likely to let the language morph and evolve along its own flow. Men use slang, sure, but overall, they are less given to experimenting. It was women who, way back when, started using the word “has” instead of “hath.” After a while, men got with the times. In the same way, these days I hear men under about 30 using “-uh!” more than I used to.
This emotionally resonant sound is now such a common way of speaking that it can be used even without exclamation, in a neutral voice to respond in an only mildly dramatic way, as if in scare quotes. “Is that really what we’re going to do?” my younger daughter asked my tween. The answer was a placid “Yessa.” No need to raise a voice. She had subtly but successfully communicated her displeasure at being asked.
I’m mentioning all this not just because “-uh” is a curiosity in its own right but also because it says a lot about a question that readers frequently ask me: How do new words or expressions get adopted? The truth is that in a great majority of cases, there really is no answer. People are creative about the words they choose and how they use them, and that creativity just keeps the language evolving. It’s no more a matter of reasons than the creativity that drove the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat or Yoko Ono.
Occasionally you can trace a clear lineage. Some years ago, kids started calling a certain kind of noise satisfying because A.S.M.R. (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos used that word a lot. The popularity among Black people of “Have a blessed day,” which someone recently wrote me to inquire about, is surely due to the central role that the church plays in the Black community.
But why are people lately saying “I appreciate you”? Why are people saying “I resonate with that”? Why are members of Gen alpha using “giving” as in “It’s giving glamour” for “It’s glamorous” and in some cases just “That outfit is really giving”? Giving what? Somewhere some person or people started putting something in a catchy way that others found satisfying, and it went linguistically viral.
It’s been happening for a long time. Into at least the 18th century, people often said just “had” where we today say “would have.” Invading Canada in 1775 at the start of the Revolutionary War,Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler wrote, “If Job had been a general in my situation, his memory had not been so famous for patience.” Anyone who tried to find a reason that “would have” took over would suffer a rather Jobian frustration. It just happened.
A hundred years ago, when people used the expression “Be yourself,” it was not a call to get in touch with your personal essence. It meant “Aw, come off it” and can throw you when watching an old movie in which someone uses it. In the 1939 film “You Can’t Get Away With Murder,” someone growls to Humphrey Bogart’s character, Frankie, and boasts, “Aw, be yourself, Frankie. Here’s one guy that’s cut all his teeth.” Frankie answers, “Well, how’d you like to have me shove ’em down your throat for you?” It would make no sense if Frankie’s challenger meant “Get in touch with your inner you.” He meant “Get real.” But why did people start saying “Be yourself,” as opposed to some other way of expressing the same sentiment? Because that’s how the ball bounced.
What’s interesting about “-uh” is less why it happened than the fact that we are watching something emerge in real time that is more often associated with other languages. In Mandarin you can mark exclamation by hanging “la” at the end of a sentence. In Yoruba you can do the same thing with the little word “o.” In English we are developing a little exclamatory particle of our own, “uh.” Why? More like wow.
John McWhorter (@JohnHMcWhorter) is an associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University. He is the author of “Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter: Then, Now and Forever” and, most recently, “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.” @JohnHMcWhorter
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