Why Do People Say 'Yeah, No'?

 

What part of “no” don’t you understand? Some of you may remember a song with this title released by Lorrie Morgan in 1992; others of you have probably read it on a T-shirt or two. You may have even said it yourself, or maybe someone has said it to you. It’s funny because the word “no” isn’t made up of smaller parts. Sure, there’s the consonant N and the vowel O, but by themselves, they don’t mean anything. The idea is that “no” is as simple as it gets, and if you can’t understand even that much, there’s no hope for you. 

Examples of ‘Yeah, No’

But when you listen closer to the ways that English speakers use the word “no,” the picture turns out to be a bit more complicated. This becomes especially apparent when someone uses “no” right next to a word that seems to have the opposite meaning: “yeah.” Here’s an example that I collected from YouTube, through the website YouGlish, which allows you to search for specific words in their corpus of YouTube videos. In this clip, movie director Brad Bird and television producer Damon Lindelof are talking about the possibility of someone making a sequel to the movie “E.T.” 

Damon Lindelof: Do I need—

Brad Bird: Thank God Spielberg has made sure that hasn’t happened. 

Damon Lindelof: Yeah, no, it’s great. And it’s just—

Brad Bird: He’s protecting that one. 

Damon Lindelof: If a movie was great then, and there hasn’t been a sequel by now, there probably shouldn’t be. 

Lindelof shows that he agrees with Bird’s sentiment by saying “yeah,” so what is a “no” doing in that sentence?

Here’s another YouTube example. In this one, Harvard professor Michael Puett is taking questions from an audience about his lecture on Chinese philosophy.

Audience member: Sort of how do you, how do you take that jump from like hermit to joyousness?

Michael Puett: Yeah, no, it’s a great question.

In this example, it’s not even clear why Puett said “yeah,” let alone put a “no” after it. 

Here’s one more example. In this one, actor Paul Scheer is being interviewed, and has been asked about some of his upcoming online shows. He’s talking about a show title that we don’t need to include in...

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