So there are these things in language called discourse markers – phrases or even single words that don’t fall neatly into normal parts of speech. They serve primarily to alert the listener to a change in direction (“I’ve been talking about that, but now I’m gonna pivot and talk about this”) or even to pay attention (“Look out, I’m gonna start talking!”). And you can see why they don’t fit into normal grammar because they are fundamentally different kinds of things from say a verb, which denotes action, or a noun which denotes a thing, right?
The first place I noticed them was on Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast. It featured really brilliant entrepreneurs from companies I’ve heard of and from companies I haven’t. And I noticed that whenever they were asked a question, they always started their answer with a discourse marker – specifically the discourse marker “so”. Like, “Tell us a little about yourself, Abe” “So, I was born in a log cabin in Kentucky” or “How does the theory of relativity work, Albert?” “So imagine you’re standing by a train track in Switzerland…”
And because every entrepreneur did this, I started wondering if it was some sort of American version of the RP accent that certain members of Britain’s upper class affect – an accent that is designed purely to indicate to hearers that the speaker went to a posh university (yes, really). Were American entrepreneurs starting all of their endless explanatory and self-mythologizing paragraphs with “so” to signal to listeners “hey! I’m a Stanford MBA entrepreneur, bucko, so treat me with respect or I’ll sic Peter Theil on you”? It certainly sounded that way.
Once I became aware of “discourse markers” I started noticing them elsewhere – in business presentations and casual conversations and even in writing. And I became particularly aware of two which had been woven like a bright red thread through much of the discourse of my life. And as I thought about these two particular discourse markers, their differences got me thinking about what they revealed about us.
And what were they?
“You know” and “I mean”.
When I was growing up, “you know” was as ubiquitous as muscle cars and it was the bane of every adult I encountered. “How was school today, Martin?” “Oh, you know, it was okay” “I KNOW? If I knew I wouldn’t be asking you now would I?” “Okay, okay… it was fine. Jeez, what a dork.”
People used “you know” at the beginnings of sentences, in the middles of sentences, and at the ends - reaching its peak (or nadir, if you prefer) when I was in the seventh grade and a teacher asked a fellow student a question on the reading. “You know, I think it’s kinda, you know… actually, I don’t know, you know?” Genius.
In contrast, “I mean” has much less flexible placement, primarily appearing at the beginnings of responses. “Where do you want to go for dinner?” “I mean… last night I had pizza, so tonight I’d like to have something a little healthier.” But despite its lack of flexibility it appears, I have found, in just as many sentences – indeed, even the first sentences in conversations – which makes little informational sense.
Because “I mean” is, if it’s anything more than a noise people populate their sentences with, a clarifier. In normal conversation it might lead the second sentence. You said something, their response indicated a lack of understanding or even misunderstanding of it, so you wish to elaborate. “Where do you want to go for dinner?” “Anything but pizza” “Don’t you like pizza?” “I mean, pizza’s great but I had it last night and I’d like something a little more healthy.” Not the most mellifluous of conversations, I grant you, but significantly more logical than the previous example which began with “I mean” and which therefore clarified… nothing.
And that’s exactly when I started thinking about what these markers might actually reveal.
“I mean” is self-contained. On the one hand, it’s about me, “I”, right? It’s what I mean. Regardless of what you think or hear or want or need. This is what I mean and I’m blasting it out into the universe, do with it as you wish. On the other hand, it’s used in a way that doesn’t really make sense in the context of a conversation. It’s almost as if the speaker is clarifying a conversation in their own head – “if I say this, and they don’t understand, then I’ll have to clarify, so I’ll just skip that back and forth and cut to the clarification”. So in a sense, it’s actually anti-conversational, because it sort of murders the give-and-take in the cradle, right?
“You know”, conversely, is fundamentally about engagement. For starters, it’s about “you”, so it’s outward facing. Second, it’s about knowledge, about the knowledge that you have. And while knowledge is not the same as data, which in a sense is the currency of conversation, it’s a helluva lot closer to it than meaning is. Meaning colors data with personal interpretation; knowledge colors it merely by retention. Or said another way, again, “I mean” is more about how I feel about the data; “you know” is about your relationship to the data.
Now, I understand that you may think that all of this is an example of spectacular over-thinking. “These are just sounds” you say, “simple markers that are utterly devoid of meaning.” I get it. Most people don’t even realize they’re saying “I mean”, any more than they realized that they were saying “you know”.
Except I think it is in the things we do by habit that reveal how we really think. The things that operate below the filters and recognition. Sort of a version of the old saying “integrity is what you do when no one is looking.” Perhaps how we really think is revealed when we aren’t conscious we are thinking at all. Orwell wrote that that which we stop being able to express, we soon lose the ability to feel or understand. This exploration of these otherwise innocuous phrases has made me wonder if that which we do express with such a consistency that we’re hardly aware we’re doing it - betrays our actual deeper thinking. On some level “you know”– as flaccid and ineffectual as it may be – is a mark of a more communal attitude. On some level “I mean” is a mark of a more self-involved, self-absorbed, and self-ish one.
And we can ignore them if we want to, but they’re still there, revealing who we really are, every time we open our mouths.
You know what I mean?