269
9.5 Whatever in Present-Day Englishexpress indifference, indecision, impatience, skepticism, etc.: ‘as you wish’; ‘if you say
so’; ‘it makes no difference to me’; ‘have it your own way’; fi ne.’
The OED cites the following discussion of the meaning of whatever given in
the San Francisco Examiner in 1982: “When someone responds ‘whatever’,
he or she seems to be saying ‘I’m amenable to anything. I’ll defer to you’. But
in my experience, when a person says ‘whatever’, he or she is really saying, ‘I
don’t want to take any responsibility. You do all of the deciding and then I’ll
pass judgment’.”
Evidence from the informal dialogue contained in the SOAP corpus sug-
gests that this usage of whatever is frequent. For example, a search of whatever
as a separate utterance yields 2714 examples of the sort given in (26):^11
(26) a. It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Whatever. (2011 AMC)
b. It didn’t work too well, obviously. Whatever. I’m out of here. (2010 AMC)
c. Fine. Fine, be that way. Whatever. (2008 OLTL)
d. Yeah, I’m fi ne. Whatever. Do whatever you want with it. Place is a dump
anyway. (2008 GL)
e. Blah, blah, blah. All right. Whatever. Suit yourself. But you’re missing a
great opportunity here. (2005 YR)
f. if it means that I have to go away, then fi ne. Whatever. But I’m not gon na
break a promise. (2002 ATWT)
g. All right. Whatever. You know, I swear, you can’t hear anything,
(2001 DAYS)
Tagliamonte ( 2016 : 201) found that although the general extender use, includ-
ing or/ and/ but/ like whatever was the most common use of whatever in con-
temporary teen language (over 50% of the instances), the stand- alone whatever
constituted over 30 percent of the uses of the word.
Despite its ubiquity in contemporary speech, this usage has received lit-
tle attention in the literature.^12 Kleiner (1998) fi nds one example of what he
calls “WHATEVER2”^13 in his data, although he believes it to be common in
everyday conversation (609). This use “serves to suspend argumentation when
resolution or agreement is deemed unlikely – it allows one to ‘bail out’ of an
11 Search conducted June 7, 2017 with the search string [punctuation] whatever [punctuation ]
and manually sorted to include only completely independent uses of whatever.
12 The authors of the following conference presentations were unable to supply me with copies
of their papers:
Reddington, Elizabeth. 2014. “ ‘Whatever’ as a discourse marker in ordinary conversation.”
Paper presented at the AAAL Conference, Portland, OR.
Blake, Renée, Maryam Bakht- Rofheart, Stefan Benus, Sabrina Cooper, Meredith Josey, and
Erica Solyom. 1999/ 2000. “I have three words for you: ‘Whatever’ as a discourse marker.”
Paper presented at NWAV 27 (1999) and IPrA 7 (2000).
13 Kleiner ’s focus is on “WHATEVER3” used in “pseudo- arguments” to mark material as “other-
authored” and to signal the speaker’s opposition to its content. A pseudo- argument is one in
which only protagonists are present, so the position of the antagonist must be supplied.