Here’s a text I recently sent to my roommate, who I’ve known since freshman year and spend every day with: “Hey wanna get dinner, NWIN.”
I have a serious case of the “no worries if not” disease. I catch myself saying it throughout the day in conversations with friends or in emails with professors, and I’ve come to hate it. “NWIN” has even become a part of how I text my friends along with “WYA” or “LOL.”
I’ll ask for something I want and before my interlocutor even has the chance to respond, I do the “favor” of offering them an “out” to whatever my request was. I did a quick search on my email for this phrase and found at least five clear instances of it — with variations like “no worries,” “we can find another time if that doesn’t work” and “I’d love to meet if that works for you.” I’ve also noticed this trend among my peers, and to their annoyance, I now call it out whenever I hear them using it.
What does this phrase even mean? Why would a peer or professor who knows me feel “worried” if they cannot oblige my request? Obviously, I have the right to ask, and they have the right to say “yes” or “no.” In fact, I think it has the opposite effect as the literal meaning of the phrase. When someone says it to me, I start to feel that by rejecting the request I did something actually worthy of worry. I didn’t feel bad at first, but on second thought, maybe I should.
“No worries if not” is a phrase that tries to erase agency. It’s a form of politeness that shifts responsibility from yourself to the person you’re talking to. Truly owning where you are and what you need is hard, and abstaining from the responsibility of whether to worry about something or not is a comfortable out. In that way, the out I’m giving my friend is really an “out” from myself. Natalya Lobanova nailed it with her “No Worries if Not!” cartoons in the New Yorker that display people in dire conditions crying out for help yet still tacking the classic line on the end. The hyperbole in her cartoons reveals the absurdity of using this phrase when you want to ask for something and must stand behind that request.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the politeness of the phrase. But perhaps we need to worry about its superficiality that shields oneself from the everyday consequences of life. I recently deleted an instance of “no worries if not” in an email to my advisor. I requested a meeting about my senior thesis that we’ve been working together on all year. He, of course, has no reason to be worried about not being able to meet at the time I propose. “No worries if not” was so ridiculous that it had to go.
This semester, I’ve been working on cutting that phrase completely out of my lexicon and instead simply asking for what I need and living with the results. I believe, and my therapist agrees, that it will not only serve me better, but it is also a kinder way to treat the people around me. I’m working on owning what I care about and creating agency for it.
This semester has manifested in this column’s writing about linguistics and living with the fear that no one cares about impersonal sentences, semantic narrowing or the phrase “no worries if not.” My mom (arguably people-pleaser-in-chief) always says to “live the honest life.” Agency and honesty are the minutiae that really matter going into the new year as we try to be truer versions of ourselves without constant projection. I hope we can all try to live closer to that — but no worries if not.
