Analyzing Everyday Rhetoric: Your/You’re Welcome

I have written before about how, as a child, I never knew what the real words to the Lord’s Prayer were. I just mumbled it along with everyone else and strung sounds together without knowing what the words were. It was years later that I discovered that the word “howl” does not enter into the Lord’s Prayer at any point (but the word “hallowed” certainly does).

The mother dear recently went on a trip and was able to spend some time with the father dear (he’s living in Cambodia, so we don’t get to see him too often). When she returned, she brought back a beautiful cameo (my favourite jewelry besides pearls!) that she and the father dear had picked out for me. I e-mailed the father dear to say thank you and when he responded with an e-mail that said, “You’re welcome”, it occurred to me that even that phrase is often mumbled (which it can’t be via e-mail, of course. The father dear knows how to enunciate his words!).

We really need to learn how to emphasize our words. Most people pronounce the phrase “your welcome” rather than “you’re”, which is very interesting because it completely changes the meaning of the phrase. “Your” implies that the person is welcoming themselves. “You’re” implies that the person being thanked was happy to be of service.

Besides the fact that it’s kind of sad that we often don’t express our happiness at having done something for another person (because if we did express ourselves appropriately, I’m sure that we would be able to enunciate our words better as we respond beamingly to a person’s heartfelt “thank you”), it is also unfortunate that we don’t tend to enunciate to assure the other person that we are saying “you’re welcome” instead of “your”. Does that negatively affect our outlook on life because it suggests that we aren’t as giving? It’s hard to say. But it is something to think about the next time someone says thank you: let them know that you really wanted to do it by enunciating the “you’re” in “you’re welcome”.

Speaking of all of this, until recently when I was conducting a spell check, I had mistakenly thought that the word “enunciate” was spelled with an “a”. Even the word “enunciate” is rarely enunciated correctly! Despairing indeed.