Oct 27 2008
in which “you all right?” only sometimes means what it sounds like
I’ve said I know more British slang than most Americans because of Doctor Who and Harry Potter, and that’s true, but sometimes I get tripped up even when I recognize some turn of phrase from one of those fandoms. Right now the one I keep getting stuck on is “You all right?” It threw me a bit when I first came across it in Order of the Phoenix a couple years ago, although not too much because it was used maybe twice in a flashback scene. To, like, the 1970s. So I was surprised to discover that while the phrase is still in use—which is a little surprising by itself; “cool” is about the only slang word I can think of offhand with real staying power—it’s apparently not quite the same as that used by James Potter. People tend to say “You all right?” rather than just “All right?” for one, which strikes me as odd since such things tend to get shorter over time rather than longer, but for another, it sometimes means what it sounds like and sometimes it doesn’t.
A professor of mine, who’s Canadian, commented last week that it took her a while to figure out that when people say “You all right?” it’s just a greeting, not an actual question, and that’s fine as far as it goes—“What’s up?” is also often used as a greeting demanding no more response than “Hi” or something—but apparently this isn’t always true. Like “What’s up?” or “How’s it going?” or whatever, it can also be a perfectly legitimate question, and I’m apparently missing all the British social cues that let me distinguish which is which. I spent a long time (basically all of high school and the first year or so of college) giving an answer like “Nothing” whenever someone said “What’s up?” to me before finally figuring out it was just a greeting and didn’t require a real answer, and not wanting to look like a complete idiot here, I’ve been generally assuming that a “You all right?” directed at me can be answered by “Hi” or a smile and nod or whatever. Except that about 90% of the time the person asking it repeats the question and I realize they actually meant it. So…okay, then.
