How-ever
I was drifting asleep one afternoon.
A fictitious conversation started playing in my head. An argument.
one character was an attitude-filled teenage girl. She ends the argument with “whatever”. (If you’re curious what the argument was about, there wasn’t really one. Pretty sure this is the first actual word that formed in my brain, the rest was just half-asleep dream-vibe.)
Whatever. What-ever. Why is that a disrespectful thing to say?
Oh, it’s sarcasm. It’s a shortened form of “whatever you say”, which is suggesting that whatever the other person says must be right. Obviously not true, obviously said ironically, implying that the “whatever”-er doesn’t actually agree with the other person.
What. Ever. Its a compound word. Do we do that with other questions? Oh, yeah, of course. Whyever did I think we didn’t? “Where should we go to eat?” “Wherever you want.” “Who should I invite?” “Whoever.”
However.
Wait. However. That means something different. That’s like “but”.
Why? Like, sure I could say “how do you want to do [thing]” and someone could respond, “However”, but that’s kinda weird, and totally unrelated to the contradiction-type usage. They’d more likely say “just do whatever works”.
However.
Maybe it started out with a more specific meaning than but? As in “However things may be”? That would make sense. But then why don’t we also use whatever in the same sense?
“People say that you should never write semantics posts on your personal blog — whatever [people say], writing about writing is never in bad taste.”
I have a feeling you could hammer together sentences with the others (whichever, whenever, whyever, wherever, who(m)ever), but in any case, however would be used instead.
My guess? “however things may be” is general enough that it won out in the popularity contest of English etymology. It can describe what, where, which, and why, and even ‘when’ can be considered a state of being. How something is.
I want to intentionally use “whyever”, as a conjunction in a speech sometime and watch people try to work out why that’s wrong in their heads.
A small post-script — I think it’s interesting how unnecessary most of our interrogatives are.
Let’s list the big ones (there are actually a LOT more interrogatives than I realized):
- What (which)
- Who (whose, whom)
- Where
- When
- Why
- How
Now check this out:
- What?
- What person?
- What place?
- What time?
- What reason?
- What manner? (how)
‘How’ definitely justifies it’s independent existence the best. It would be cumbersome to ask “In what manner are you proceeding today?” instead of “How are you?”. The others are a little more surprising. I’ll often say “what time?” instead of when, and that’s simply natural.
Good for English, getting diversified and specific interrogatives.
Yes, this is completely irrelevant, however, I’d call it irrelevant and interesting.
