Chris Coyier

“Right?” – The New Semi-Colon

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

I do screencasts over on CSS-Tricks. About 40-60 minutes a pop of just me talking into a microphone. So if I have any annoying speech habits, I tend to hear about it. I’ve been ragged on a few times for saying “Right.”

Not “Right” as in “I made a right turn.”, but just tossed in causally like “So now now we have this result in Firefox. Right.” Also very common is to use it in between two sentences: “Internet Explorer will show the corners as squares. Right. And it’s not important.” The “Right” comes quickly, like a spoken semi-colon.

Now that I’ve been tuned into it, I’ve tried to stop saying it myself because I feel it’s slangy and unnecessary for clean communication. And now that I’m tuned into it, I hear it all the time. It’s a rather strange trend that it seems to me has just emerged in the last year or so.

Other notes:

• It’s not a replacement for “uhm”. People use both.
• It seems like this is fairly new (last six months or a year?)
• It seems like slang or a trend. A similar phenomenon is starting sentences with “I feel like…”, in really weird places. E.g. “I feel like last time we were here we played pool.”
• I noticed this heavily in all the speakers at An Event Apart Chicago 09. Every single speaker did it, except Andy Clarke and Simon Willison who were the two speakers who were not from the United States.