What Part of “No, Totally” Don’t You Understand?

ILLUSTRATION BY ELLEN SURREY

Not long ago, I walked into a friend’s kitchen and found her opening one of those evil, impossible-to-breach plastic blister packages with a can opener. This worked, and struck me as brilliant, but I mention it only to illustrate a characteristic that I admire in our species: given almost any entity, we will find a way to use it for something other than its intended purpose. We commandeer cafeteria trays to go sledding, “The Power Broker” to prop open the door, the Internet to look at kittens. We do this with words as well—time was, spam was just Spam—but, lately, we have gone in for a particularly dramatic appropriation. In certain situations, it seems, we have started using “no” to mean “yes.”

Here’s Lena Dunham demonstrating this development, during a conversation with the comedian Marc Maron on his podcast “WTF.” The two are talking about people who reflexively disparage modern art:

MARON: They can look at any painting and go, “Eh.” They can look at a Rothko and go, “Hey, three colors.” And then you want to hit them.
DUNHAM: No, totally.

Dunham is twenty-eight years old, but the “No, totally!” phenomenon is not limited to her generation. It’s not even limited to “No, totally.” I first started noticing it when a fiftysomething acquaintance responded to a question I asked by saying, “Yup! No, very definitely.” That sent me looking for other examples, which turn out to be almost nonexistent in written English but increasingly abundant in speech. In 2001, the journalist Bernard Kalb told the White House correspondent Dana Milbank that it was the job of reporters to thoroughly investigate political candidates, to which Milbank responded, “Oh, no, yes, I agree with you there.” In 2012, Anderson Cooper, talking with the CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger, referred to Newt Gingrich as “the guy who has come back from the dead multiple times.” Borger’s reply veered toward Molly Bloom terrain: “Yes, no, exactly, exactly, exactly.”

“No, totally.” “No, definitely.” “No, exactly.” “No, yes.” These curious uses turn “no” into a kind of contranym: a word that can function as its own opposite. Out of the million-odd words in the English language, perhaps a hundred have this property. You can seed a field, in which case you are adding seeds, or seed a grape, in which case you are subtracting them. You can be in a fix but find a fix for it. You can alight from a horse to observe a butterfly alighting on a flower.

Such words—also called auto-antonyms, antagonyms, Janus words, and antiologies—can arise for different reasons. Some are just a special kind of homonym; what appears to be one word with two opposite meanings is really two different words with identical spellings and pronunciations. Thus “clip,” meaning “to attach together,” comes from the Anglo-Saxon clyppan, while “clip,” meaning “to cut off,” comes from the Old Norse klippa. Other contranyms arise when nouns becomes verbs. Sometime around 1200 A.D., dust turned into a verb and, as dust will do, went every which way: “to dust” can mean to remove dust, as from a bookshelf, or to add something dusty, as flour to a cake pan or snow to the streets of Brooklyn. Alternatively, a contranym can reverse meanings when it is used as a different part of speech. As a noun, “custom” refers to a behavior that is common to many people. As an adjective, it refers to something designed for just one person.

Occasionally, however, a contranym arises through a process called amelioration, whereby a normally negative word develops a secondary, positive meaning. This phenomenon is particularly common in slang: “bad” becomes good, “wicked” becomes awesome, and “sick” and “ill” become wonderful. (They have been ameliorated: made better.) The use of “no” to mean “yes” appears to be an example of amelioration, but with one important distinction: “no” can’t mean “yes” on its own. Consider a slightly abridged version of Lena Dunham’s conversation about art appreciation:

MARON: And then you want to hit them.
DUNHAM: No.

Take away the “totally” and Dunham appears to be rejecting anti-philistine violence. By contrast, you can take away the “no” without doing any evident semantic damage at all. A perfectly fine response to “Then you want to hit them” is “Totally”—or, for that matter, “Yes, totally,” or just “Yes.” In fact, every instance of “No, totally” and its kindred phrases can be replaced with “Yes,” without any disruption of grammar or meaning. So why do we sometimes use “no” instead?

At first blush, “no” does not appear to be the kind of word whose meaning you can monkey with. For one thing, there is its length. At just two letters and one syllable, it lacks the pliable properties of longer words. You can’t stuff stuff inside it. (You can say “unfreakingbelievable,” but you cannot say “nfreakingo.”) You can’t mangle it, à la “misunderestimate” or (the finest example I’ve heard lately) “haphazardous.” On the contrary, it is so simple and self-contained that it is a holophrasm, a word that can serve as a complete sentence. (Holophrasms aren’t common in English, but any verb in command form can be holophrastic—“Go,” “Help,” “Run”—and babies just learning to talk use single words to express complex ideas all the time, albeit without regard to grammar: “Ball,” “Up,” “Want.”) Moreover, the word has the apparent fixity and clarity of a logical operator: like “if,” “then,” “and,” “or,” and “not,” “no” seems designed to be unambiguous. When we ask, in the face of excessive pestering, “What part of ‘no’ don’t you understand?,” what we mean is: “Unless you are a complete cretin, there is no part of ‘no’ that you could possibly misunderstand.”

Well, perhaps you would care to join me for a while in the land of complete cretinhood. For instance, answer me this, if you can: What part of speech is “no”? I thought it over for a while and concluded that it must be an interjection, even though it fails the Mad Libs test. (“The burglar bumped into the dresser and exclaimed, ‘___, my toe!’ ” The last time someone filled in a blank like that with “no” was never.) At a generous estimate, I was only one-sixth correct—but, in my defense, “no” resists all ready grammatical categorization. It is not an interjection, except when it is. (“Oh, no, I missed the train.”) It is not a noun, except when it is. (“The nos have it.”) It is not an adjective, except when it is. (“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”) It is not an adverb, except when it is. (“I’m no clearer on this than I was when I began.”) Some linguists grant it the separate part-of-speech status of “sentence word,” because, as I noted, it can serve as a stand-alone sentence. Others consider it a particle—even though, as a rule, the point of particles is precisely that they can’t stand alone; they exist to affect the meaning of other words.

In addition to this grammatical ambiguity, “no” also sometimes suffers from semantic ambiguity—which is odd, considering that we regard it as absolute. But consider the question “You aren’t a fan of cilantro?” The answer “No” is confusing, since it can mean either “No, it tastes like dish soap” or “No, I adore it.” Some languages avoid this type of indeterminacy. In Japanese, for instance, hai and iie, although generally translated as “yes” and “no,” actually mean something closer to “That’s correct” and “That’s incorrect.” This eliminates the grey area. “You’re not a fan of cilantro?” “That’s incorrect,” you are a fan. In English, by contrast, we must resort to elaboration: “No, I like it fine, I just don’t want any on my pancakes.”

Until the end of the sixteenth century or thereabouts, English had a tidier solution to this problem: we had two words for “no,” which we used in distinct ways. Those two words formed half of what’s called a four-form system of negation and affirmation. If you speak French (or, in a statistical unlikelihood, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, or Icelandic), you are familiar with a three-form system: in French, n__on can negate anything, oui is used only in response to positively phrased questions or statements, while si is used to contradict questions or statements phrased in the negative. In Franglish:

Would you like to have dinner with me on Friday?
Oui, I’d like that very much.

You don’t like the cilantro pesto I made?
Si, it’s delicious!

Back when English was a four-form system, it, too, had a si—a word used specifically to contradict negative statements. That word was “yes.” To affirm positive statements, you used “yea”:

Shoot, there aren’t any open pubs in Canterbury at this hour.
Yes, there are.

Is Chaucer drunk?
Yea, and passed out on the table.

Similarly, “nay” was used to respond to positive statements or questions, while “no” was reserved for contradicting anything phrased in the negative:

Is the Tabard open?
Nay, it closed at midnight.

Isn’t Chaucer meeting us here?
No, he went home to bed.

Over time, the distinction withered, “yea” and “nay” became obsolete, and “yes” and “no”—the words that started out as special cases, for responding exclusively to negatives—came to hold their current status. Or, as the case may be, statuses.

What does all this have to do with the strange case of “No, totally”? The linguists I spoke with thought that this use of “no” might be a response to an implicit or explicit negative in the preceding statement: the type of “no” we used back when we also had “nay.” In modern English, you need to use something to clear up the cilantro-style confusion—so why not “totally” or its ilk? Here’s ABC News’s Joy Behar talking to the comedian Ricky Gervais about how girls, unlike boys, are not encouraged to make fools of themselves in public:

BEHAR: Well, they don’t get rewarded for acting stupid.
GERVAIS: No, exactly, yes.

Because Behar’s statement is negative, either “yes” or “no” on its own would be a confusing response. Gervais chooses “no,” then has to add “exactly, yes” to indicate that he doesn’t mean “No, Joy, you’re wrong.” You could argue that there’s also a negative, this one implicit, in the exchange between Mark Maron and Lena Dunham. By that logic, Maron is really saying, “You want to hit them [because these guys don’t know anything about art],” and Dunham’s reply means, “No, they don’t, I totally agree.”

In suggesting this negation theory of “No, totally,” linguists are borrowing from their far more developed explanation of a seemingly similar expression: “Yeah, no.” The “no” in that phrase is generally thought to retain its customary negative function. I’m a little dubious about whether that’s the whole story, but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to ignore “Yeah, no” here. For one thing, those who are interested can refer to what the Oxford English Dictionary lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower called “the extensive ‘Yeah, no’ literature.” (An excellent place to start is this three-part analysis by the University of Pennsylvania linguistics professor Mark Liberman.) For another, the comparison only gets us just so far—because in many examples of “No, totally!” there doesn’t seem to be any negation whatsoever. Consider:

LYDIA: That book is constructed so brilliantly. It’s like a locked-room mystery.
IVAN: No, totally.

In this case and many others like it, “No, totally” appears to be all affirmation—a surprised and happy seconding. A rough translation might be, “Wow, that’s just how I feel!”

We’ve been using “no” to express surprise, including happy surprise, for a very long time. You hear that use in “No way!” You hear it (or heard it) in the early-aughts slang “Oh no you di’int!”And you hear it in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” after Tom asks Huck Finn what you can do with a dead cat. Why, you can use it to cure warts, Huck replies. “No! Is that so?” Tom exclaims. Here, “no” is again serving as an interjection, akin to the “damn” in the phrase, “Damn, that’s smart”—“damn” being another normally negative word that can sometimes swap polarity and become positive. With both “damn” and “no,” the slimmest hint of the negative might linger, in the form of envious admiration. But, for the most part, this enthusiastic “no” has very little negative meaning, or really much semantic content at all. It is more like verbal punctuation—like the initial, upside-down exclamation mark in Spanish that alerts you to impending excitement: ¡Totally!

I don’t mean to suggest that animated agreement singlehandedly explains all instances of “No, totally,” or that the negation theory is wrong. The way we use language is so variable and versatile that Occam’s razor does not apply; both explanations might easily be correct, and several others as well. In some cases, the expression might simply function as a conversational hinge—“No, totally, but what I was going to say was…”—akin to the empty but rudder-like “no” in that phrase comedians love to deploy immediately after jokes: “No, but seriously, folks.” Or maybe—and this is the theory I like best, but can least substantiate—“No, totally” is really a contraction of “I know, totally.” That is linguistically improbable; I know of no instance in the English language where a homophonic slippage of this sort has taken place. But I like the theory anyway, because it captures what is often the semantic intent of “No, totally” with uncanny precision: I understand, and I am fully in accord.

And, ultimately, it is the semantics that counts. If we are turning words inside-out to create more ways to agree with one another, I am all for it. No language could have too many ways to express the pleasure of emotional, aesthetic, and intellectual connection—or, for that matter, too many ways to simply say yes. Saying yes as often as possible is, famously, the first rule of improv, vital to maintaining energy, imagination, and humor. It is also, I have long thought, a sure sign that you're falling in love, not to mention crucial to sustaining that love over the long haul. And, while sometimes impractical, dangerous, or just plain dumb, saying yes to as much stuff as possible is, over all, a pretty good strategy for getting through life.

In the course of investigating this subject, I called up Shaun Lau, who hosts, together with Brian Hanson, the film-criticism podcast “No, Totally!” When I asked Lau how he came to choose the name, he told me that he was bored with critical conversations in which people who disagreed spoke past each other to try to score points with the audience. “It just didn’t seem interesting to me to be another guy arguing with another guy,” he said. But nor was he interested in predictable or polite agreement. The phrase “No, totally!” seemed to suggest, instead, genuine engagement: a startled, joyful discovery of common ground. To use it, he said, “You have to be in a conversation that has a certain level of passion.”