The wise observer of language and society who alerted me to this growing menace knows who she is, and the English-speaking world may one day have cause to thank her for this early warning, for her cranking of the linguistic air raid siren handle.
In local newspapers up and down the land, on greeting cards (typographed and handwritten), in letters, postcards, faxes, notelets and unsolicited scraps of paper pushed through letterboxes, on professionally-printed signs and hoardings, on Web pages, emails, bulletin boards and Usenet, in mobile text messages and increasingly on television and radio, the sinister shrunken head, 'thankyou', is insinuating its slithery presence.
It is a perfect example of a meme (search for 'meme AND dawkins' in any search engine to understand what this means, if you like). It is a benefically-adaptive, universally-applicable alteration of an existing form. It is benefically-adaptive as it appeals to our growing need to shave any reasonable millisecond from the process of daily communication (it saves an 'unnecessary' keystroke when typing or an 'unnecessary' hand movement and pen lift when writing). For that reason, it has an abundance of food within the population of time-starved writers and typers on which to feed, reproduce and spread. It is a universally-applicable alteration as it is the result of a minor change to a widespread and well-understood entity that neither reduces the meaning of the original form nor hinders its comprehension.
In short, using the language of neo-Darwinian evolutionary practice, it confers benefit to the memetic (rather than genetic, in this case) phenotype (i.e. vehicle) that carries it, in the form of a cost saving, without significant risk (save reduced credibility from people who give a toss about language).
The 'thankyou' meme is in the ascendant and is busy weaving its tentacles into the minds of copy-, sub- and chief-editors no longer able to differentiate at a glance between it and its antecedent. Such vanguards of house style and consistency are the Home Guard of language, the Dad's Army protecting, at the last resort, our island of a language from the invading forces of inertia, forgetfulness, ennui, and copycat-ism, and their line of resistance, in this regard, has been broken. The floodgates are now open for successive waves of similar infiltrations.
Is 'thank you' to go the same way as 'all right', to be diminished across the scale to an inferior, faded carbon copy? Have we learned 'no thing' (ref. Will Self's How The Dead Live)? The late-twentieth century and early-twenty first century tyranny of space- and time-saving appear finally to have caught up with that pleasantly-redundant, socially-cohesive phrase, 'thank you'.
The phrase 'thank you' is, of course and strictly speaking, redundant. Once a transaction has been completed, there is no real need to stretch the dialogue out further. After a door has been held open for you, after a shopkeeper has given you your change, after the check-in attendant has sent your bag to the three-a-side football pitch of stowage or after somebody has done you any manner of small favour, pumping yet more transactional gas in the form of saying 'thank you' is utterly unnecessary, yet we do it and, furthermore, feel aggrieved and slighted if the same gas is not pumped in our direction when we are the favour givers. Why do it at all?
It is a form of irrational exuberance, albeit not of the same scale as that other, recent form of irrational exuberance that led to billions of pounds, dollars, franks, marks and yen being invested around 1999 in companies the size of your local corner shop that promised, and often actually delivered, the world's most compelling laryngitis-related Web portal.
Saying, writing or typing 'thank you' is a (semi-) conscious effort that we make to acknowledge another's interaction with us, whether the other's act be one of kindness or just duty. It is a freely-given gift that expends the giver's resources for no reasons other than, ultimately and simultaneously, to strengthen social bonds and to conform to societal mores, the latter being, in a neo-Darwinian sense, a function of the former.
Saying 'thank you', like certain other pleasantries, is, to draw this rambling drivel to a close, something that should be outside and excluded from the current drive to compact, downsize, miniaturise, economise and optimise our everyday, prosaic linguistic interactions.
To end this tract (for which any random offer of an honorary doctorate from any tin shack of a university would be gratefully accepted), I say "be an ace, preserve the space; thank you".
For each domain shown in the figures, I counted the number of hits for 'thankyou' and for 'thank you' using Google's 'site:' operator. E.g., for .ac.uk (UK polytechnics and universities) I did two searches: "site:ac.uk "thankyou"" and "site:ac.uk "thank you"".
Figure 1 shows the proportion of total Web pages that give thanks (i.e. that contain either 'thankyou' and/or 'thank you') that are accounted for by the abomination 'thankyou'. Each domain is colour coded as shown on the chart: UK-specific domains are in yellow, global domains are blue, US-specific domains are red, and the general Google search result with no domain specified is in green.
The result may be fairly clear to see. It is UK sites (specifically commercial UK sites) that are most wont to flaunt the execresence 'thankyou'.
Figure 1. 'Thankyou' as a Proportion of All Thanks-giving (All Hits)
Some of the domains in Figure 1 are sparsely populated, i.e. there are relatively few Web sites within them, which may make comparisons statistically dodgy (a technical term).
Figure 2 shows the same data, but excludes domains for which there were fewer than 1,000 hits in total. It means dropping the domains '.gb.com', '.uk.co' and others, partly because they're rubbish domains that only desperate people would attempt to use, but mostly because there are not enough people desperate enough to use them. For example, there were just 29 hits on 'thank you' for .gb.com, and only 6 hits on 'thankyou', compared with 3.1 million total hits on .com sites. Maybe there is a huge population of gb.com-registered companies that don't like to say thanks, or maybe there are just a few dozen companies in that domain in total. Either way, they fail to achieve the critical mass required for Figure 2, which shows all domains with over 1,000 hits in total.
Figure 2 shows again that UK-specific domains congregate at the shameful end of the 'thankyou' spectrum. This particular, peculiar contraction seems to be a British phenomenon, rather than an American import. US-specific domains (.us, .mil, .gov) are, like, way hardly on the chart, dude.
So, shame on UK companies (.co.uk, .uk.com) for promulgating this atrocity, but congratulations to UK public sector bodies (.nhs.uk, ,gov,uk) for resisting the tide of filth. A lukewarm nod to the guardians of our youth in the UK (.sch.uk, .ac.uk), for coming somewhat, but not much, under the Internet average. "Let our kids eschew / the frightful 'thankyou'", etc.
Figure 2. 'Thankyou' as a Proportion of All Thanks-giving (1,000+ Hits)
To hammer home the final nail in this rapidly-mouldering coffin, a final chart that hopes to prove once and for all that 'thankyou' is a delight peculiar to the UK. Figure 3 shows a cumulative count of UK versus non-UK instances of 'thankyou'. It ranks all 26 domains in order of 'thankyou'ness, from the guilt-ridden commercial UK companies through to the butter-wouldn't-melt US organisations. Each UK-specific domain gets a tick upwards; each non-UK domain adds nothing to the cumulative score.
The result is shown by the red line. If UK domains were no more likely to say 'thankyou' than any global or US domain, the red line would do what the green line does, simply accumulate steadily from first to last. As it turns out, though, the red line stays above the linear green line nearly all the way, showing that 'thankyou' really is a UK-specific problem, and not (yet) a global catastrophe.
The blue line, by contrast, plots the reverse of the red UK line. It's redundant in a sense, but shows what the picture may look like if the 'thankyou' meme were a global, rather than a UK, concern.
Figure 3. 'Thankyou' as a Cumulative Count, UK vs non-UK
I vaguely hope that this page is of use to someone at some time, but rather doubt it ever will be. If you've strayed here accidentally, sorry for taking up your time. If you think anyone you know may be interested in this, give them the URL.
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