Perhaps it's too vague or it reminds them of a moody teenager countering a criticism from an elder, circa 1995.
Whatever the issue is (see what we did there?), for the ninth year in a row, participants in a recent Marist Poll survey asking Americans which word or phrase used in everyday conversation was most irritating, a good chunk of them selected "whatever."
Some 33 percent of respondents picked the word, while runners up included "fake news" (23 percent) and "no offense, but…" (20 percent).
"Fake news," of course, made its debut in our lexicon roughly a year ago, when the public grappled with the extent of the impact of faulty internet posts that deliberately misrepresented the facts for web traffic on the 2016 election. Most of it smeared Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
As the phrase's popularity grew, Donald Trump and his supporters began using it for their own ends by accusing conventional media outlets of making up stories.
The age breakdown shows differing generational attitudes toward the top vote-getting words. Some 40 percent of people over 45 chose "whatever," compared to 26 percent of respondents under that age. The younger set disliked "no offense, but…" the most (28 percent).
But even if "whatever" is the most disliked word of the bunch, researchers noted that the gap between it and other words is slimming.
“Since 2015, we have seen a narrowing between ‘whatever’ and the rest of the list,” Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion, said in a written statement. “It has been more than 20 years since ‘whatever’ first gained infamy in the movie Clueless. While the word irks older Americans, those who are younger might not find ‘whatever’ to be so annoying.”
Other words and phrases that made the list: "ya know, right," "I can't even" and "huge." (Like "fake news," that last despised word we mention may have been inspired by Trumpism, given the president's notorious use of the word.)
Read a breakdown of the poll data and methodology here.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.