No worries!
I don’t know if this is specific to Los Angeles or it cropped up all over the country in 2004 and just happened to coincide with my move here, but personally I think it’s an L.A. thing. People don’t say “you’re welcome” anymore. It’s too formal, apparently, even chilly. I thought we’d all settled on the easy-breezy, “No problem” in reply to thanks, but that lacks the panache that we crave out here on the coast.
So now it’s “No worries”.
At first I thought it was just my property manager, to whom I get to apologize often because I traipse in late with the rent about once every three months. “No worries,” she’d say, and I’d think “Isn’t that an Australian thing? I thought she was from Canada”. Then I noticed my neighbors from New York and Illinois, also chirping “no worries”. The guy at the coffee shop, from Alabama, has no worries. Most of the waitresses and bartenders I encounter are similarly unworried by my abrupt changes in drink order.
I am wondering, now, if this is an indicator that Australia is the new Europe. Americans love to borrow European slang to show off how cool we are. For a while, everything was “brilliant”, but that soon faded. Perhaps Europe isn’t the ‘in’ thing anymore. Perhaps we will start saying “I got into a blue (fight),” and telling people to “rack off” when we are tired of them. Maybe we’ll all “have a naughty” instead of getting laid.
I suppose it’s too soon to say. For now, all I can assume with any assurance is that nobody in Los Angeles is worried. Well, not the white people anyhow. Hispanics are still worried, probably for good reason, but that’s a whole different blog entry.
