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I Mean
Is it just me? At first I was worried that I had picked up a quirky habit when I caught myself prefacing most statements last week with the phrase, “I mean.” Since then, though, I’ve noticed lots of people saying it. Even an interviewee on the local NPR show this morning saw fit to begin his answer by assuring listeners that it was indeed he who was expressing the views and that he did indeed mean them. I suppose the phrase is just one of those phatic tags designed to create a pause or simply indicate that something relevant is about to be said. I guess these phrases keep the conversational wheels humming. I wonder, though, what it means when they seep into the mediated now by virtue of moving from an individual’s quirk to a common cultural styling. I mean it’s like every other sentence now begins with “I mean.”
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Re: I Mean
You know, I've always heard/said "I mean" when I feel like I didn't say exactly what I meant in my previous statements-- a way of summarizing more concisely whatever my point was. Clarifying. Especially when someone responds to a variation of my intention, rather than what I had hoped to convey. I had just assumed that's what everyone else was feeling when they said it, that they didn't say something right.
And I've never seen a citation in a blog comment before-- that's awesome Habib.
I Mean...what about Guy?
Guy, to me, is a dialect/slang. Not a word.
Linguistic vary not only by region, but also by socioeconomic class.
Language varieties are often called dialects rather than languages.
I mean...You know...So...Like...Language Change
Sociolinguistics and language change...
The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates describes that linguistic change occurs in the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that “linguistic change can be said to have taken place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by other members of that community and accepted as the norm.” (Coates, 1992: 169)