Article: "Whatever" do you mean? With a single word, we can now dismiss one another quickly and definitively.(word use in popular speech )(Column)

I'm not exactly sure who first used it on me. It might have been my treasured teenage niece or one of my beloved step-granddaughters. Either way, I have the distinct memory that it was someone younger than I, someone to whom I was delivering a buoyant lecture about the importance of kindness or some such thing. The listener restlessly shifted her hips, rolled her eyes and departed with a one-word retort: "Whatever."

It was relatively light, that "whatever," a little singsongy, adolescent and good-natured. Nonetheless, I registered it hard. I had been dismissed, shut down, made to feel preachy and decidedly uncool. Could one little word be so powerful? It was an ...

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