Three Words Silas Won't Make A Habit Out Of
The last few days have been spent proofing the first edited cut of the audiobook. Hearing a narrator say lines you wrote is a strange experience; every word that isn't quite the character's comes through the headphones a little louder than the rest. . .
[newsletter readers pick up here]
. . . And every time Silas thanked somebody, it reopened a question I thought I'd settled while writing the books: the phrase "I appreciate you." It's a lovely thing to say, but I'm suddenly hearing it everywhere, and it seems to have come out of nowhere. I care not just out of curiosity, but because I have a character (Silas, of course) who really wants to say it, and after doing some research while writing his dialogue, I decided, on balance, he probably shouldn't make it a habit.
It’s not a clear-cut or easy-to-make decision because English is regional, generational, varies between sub-groups, and usage norms are always drifting over time. A phrase can mean one thing in Georgia and land differently in Gloucester; the same three words can feel intimate to one listener and like a cashier's sign-off to another. Language is fascinating that way.
Consider a regionalism like “down Cape.” Everybody around Cape Cod knows "down Cape" means out toward Provincetown, at the far tip, and "up Cape" means back toward the canal and the mainland, which is upside down on a map. Or consider a word that has eroded. In the 1980s “awesome” still had some actual awe in it. By the end of the 1990s, it basically meant “fine” as in “Oh, that’s awesome” in response to mildly good news. Or consider a word that has been promoted, for example, "Hey" as a greeting. Anyone raised in the Northeast before roughly 1980 was reflexively told "hay is for horses." Now it's the default opener in a text. In the span of a generation it went from rude to standard.
What I found when trying to get to the bottom of “I appreciate you” was that the words themselves are old and the construction is unremarkable; you could always appreciate a person, meaning you held them in high regard. What's new is using it as a stand-in for "thank you." As near as I can tell, most of the evidence points to Southern and Black American speech, where it's been ordinary for a long time, often clipped to "'preciate ya"; and it went national in the last decade or so, carried by pop culture, sports interviews, and TV characters, then perhaps amplified by service workers, who have every reason to want something warmer than a worn-out 'thanks.
The tricky part here is that the phrase really sounds like Silas. It’s economical, warmer than he lets on, and the three words carry more than they say. I was really tempted to have him use it. But authenticity is built on where a character comes from and what he's exposed to, and Silas fails both tests: he isn't Southern, and he isn't marinating in the podcasts, sitcoms, and post-game interviews that spread a phrase like this. If he said it, a sharp reader would hear the author, not the character. Much of the writing job is exactly this kind of unglamorous checking: hundreds of small decisions about what a person would and wouldn't say, most of which the reader never notices until you get one really wrong.
So in the end I ruled on the side of avoiding having Silas say it habitually. Silas will keep saying someone is “worth their weight in pie,” “you work miracles. Couldn’t make it a day without you,” “you didn’t have to, but glad you did,” or “you make every day ten miles easier." And I’ll keep listening for the next phrase that sneaks up on me.
In the meantime, drop me a line in the contact form: do you say “I appreciate you”? Where are you from? When did you start?
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