Why Is Everyone Saying "100%"?
Decades ago, when I lived in Montreal to do my master’s, I didn’t bother learning French. I thought I’d just “pick it up,” naturally, effortlessly. “Through osmosis,” I half-joked. It didn’t work out. I never learned any French—except for one thing, the phrase ché pas, Quebec slang for “I don’t know,” which I heard everywhere and used it frequently myself.
Picking up such words and idiomatic phrases is, of course, central to the way in which language works. William Burroughs once wrote that “language is a virus,” and he was right: words and phrases seem to float in the air; they get picked up and passed around, and sometimes they become fashionable for a time before they fade away again (think of such old-timey phrases as how d’ you do?, groovy, dig that now make one cringe); or, sometimes they become cemented into the structure of language (like the post-1960s way in which the word hopefully is now used, or the acceptance of the split-infinitive—“to boldly go where no man has gone before”—or, more recently, the general acceptance of the singular they). When I returned to Canada in 2006 after living in South Korea for nine years, I was perplexed by the strange popularity of the phrase Wait for it. Where did it come from? And why was everyone saying it? (I’ve since learned the answer.) It was also around that time that the word dude also became popular. For years, it was a word I reviled. It was too young for me, too “slang-y” and illiterate-sounding, and so at odds with how I spoke and the kinds of words I used until, one day, maybe ten or so years later, it suddenly wasn’t, and I adopted it as my own (usually as a slightly patronizing but lighthearted jab, as in, “Dude, what are you doing?”).
More recent examples of fashionable words and phrases include that inane portmanteau oftentimes, the endlessly repeated phrase talks about (you need to be an English teacher who marks essays for a living or a listener of podcasts to recognize the sheer repetition of this phrase), and the Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum of language: literally and honestly, and the offspring of the latter: to tell you the truth and I’m not gonna lie. Discussion of literally and honestly deserves its own blog post, and I’ll save that for next time. What I wish to focus on here, however, is the brand new and sudden rise of the phrase 100%.
The first time I heard it a few weeks ago I immediately fell in love with it. When I asked my property manager if something in my unit was going to get fixed, he replied “100%.” When I asked a store clerk if it was still possible to get a refund on a used item, he too replied, “100%.” And when I pushed back a rental car reservation and asked the agent on the phone if I would still be guaranteed a car at that hour, she too dispelled my fears by that simple answer: “100%.” The first few times I heard it, I thought it was highly original and therefore—to use Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year—authentic. Above all, I loved the absolute and total assurance conveyed by this simple response. It was effectively a promise or, even better, a money-back guarantee! And in an era that’s short on trust in our institutions, 100% signalled that not only could you trust the speaker, but that the speaker was wholly on your side, and that your request or favour or proposition wasn’t in the least unreasonable, stupid, or outlandish. It was as if you had unwittingly taken a test—a pop quiz—and not only had you passed it, but in fact you scored perfect! And who doesn’t like 100%? I hesitate to admit (I won’t say honestly) that I even felt a little burst of affection for those first few speakers who said it to me, a little dopamine rush that, I understood, was not unlike a thumbs-up emoji: something that made you feel good, especially if a sizable number was next to it.
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But after a few weeks, the novelty wore off and I already grew weary of hearing 100%. In that short span of time, I’d gone from wholehearted approbation to disillusionment, and I imagine that it won’t be long before it too will go the way of literally and honestly: thoughtless verbal reflexes that not only say little but, like so much else of what we encounter today, is of dubious sincerity—like the auto-fill of speech. Far from a sign of originality, this phrase is really a reflection of not just the broader culture in which we live but of the degree to which technology plays in our lives and its role in influencing our thought and speech.
By definition, 100% is an answer that rules out all other possibilities; indeed, that the response is 100% and not 99% emphasizes in a quantifiable way that there is no wiggle-room for nuance, subtlety, complexity, exception, or compromise, much more so than a simple yes or no answer might convey. What it offers is an all-or-nothing or zero-sum response that is not unlike the way much of contemporary thought, and political discourse in particular, has been both characterized and criticized. (One need look no further than the Israel-Gaza conflict, the war in Ukraine, and recent US elections for examples.) It is a reflection, in other words, of our cultural tendency—spurred on by the way in which social media categorizes, separates, and polarizes people and ideas—to interpret and respond to the world in an increasingly simplistic, increasingly dichotomous, even Manichean way: good/bad, friend/enemy, thumbs-up/thumbs-down, blue/red, oppressor/oppressed. In a technologically dominated world that eschews complexity and difficulty but valorizes brevity, simplicity, convenience, efficiency, easy answers, and “plain-and-simple English”—not to mention a populace suffering from shortened attention spans—the message that 100% conveys is reassuringly short and simple: there is no ambiguity.
That a reply to a yes/no question should take the form of a number also seems to underscore the extent to which we rely on numbers—on data—to make sense of the world. We are a culture obsessed with, for example, the number of likes, followers, friends, downloads, views, and shares. There are the numbers attached to nearly every aspect of our lives, including products on Amazon, books on Goodreads, our Uber drivers, restaurants we’re thinking of going to, movies we might watch, even transactions conducted on Kijiji (“Rate your seller!”). There are the endless stats, polls, and surveys we are confronted with daily, and the endless requests to fill out surveys: (“Tell us what you think?” “How satisfied were you?”; and “Rate us on Facebook!”). Even, when we go to the doctor, we are asked to rate the level of pain we experience.
There is the vast scope of numbers related to health and our preoccupation with “tracking” everything that can be empirically tracked: the number of calories, hours of sleep, glasses of water, ounces of alcohol, cups of coffee, steps taken, laps swum in a pool or run around a track; not to mention the number of days of resistance training per week, the number of sets, reps, and minutes of rest. We are a society obsessed with our weight and BMI, and we turn to food labels to determine if the grams of sugar, fat, carbohydrates, protein, and sodium make something worth consuming. And then there are the milligrams or international units of calcium, betacarotene, magnesium, iron, zinc, and the alphabet soup of vitamins we ingest to supplement whatever may be deficient in our diets—deficiencies that have often determined by another vast array of mysterious numbers yielded by a blood or urine analysis.
Similarly, students are fixated with the numbers on their test scores (and less so with actually learning something), their GPA, and with the class average. Shoppers are concerned with prices, sales, and points earned, points redeemed. Investors keep careful track of the stock markets, quarterly and annual earnings’ reports, inflation and interest rates, the exchange rate, the bond markets. There is the temperature, the day’s high and overnight low, the chance of precipitation. And as individuals, we don’t exist without a SIN number, a student- or employee-number, or phone number.
Above all, our obsession with numbers stems from a cultural addiction to speed and efficiency, something that began, as Lewis Mumford argues in Technics and Civilization, in the 12th century with the invention of the mechanical clock; a preoccupation that has only continued to accelerate ever since.
Numbers—and I feel I’ve only scratched the surface on the possible examples—can either provide assurance or cause for alarm; they largely determine what course of action we’ll take. One hundred percent is a good number. It’s like the very building blocks of computer language and its infinitesimal combination of one’s and zero’s. And 100% is the simplest of codes: one-zero-zero. We are, one could say, speaking like computers—an irony given that as computers “learn” to speak like humans, we are learning to speak like computers. And in the world of computers 100% means your computer is updated and fully protected against all viruses and malware; 100% means an app has completely downloaded and is ready to use; 100% means that your phone is fully charged and you can confidently go through your day without worry. One hundred percent is the score the speaker rated your request, favour, or idea, and saying it suggests that a number is a better substitute for and communicates more clearly than words.
So what are the words that are implicit but unspoken? “Absolutely,” “Oh yeah, for sure,” “Without a doubt,” “No question,” “Certainly”—plus any number of other phrases unique to a particular context. Just as thumbing out full words and sentences on a phone, or even hitting the shift key, is annoying, speaking actual words and in full sentences, it would seem, has become just as troublesome. (It’s one of the great ironies that with every increase in convenience brought about with some technological advancement, whatever labour remains is regarded as increasingly vexing.)
If this cute, benign-seeming, popular phrase is, as I have suggested above, a kind of verbal emoji, it’s also an indication of how much we seem to rely on emojis, GIFS, and auto-fill in our communication. The vast and growing choice of “pictograms” embedded in our phones that many of us turn to when texting or emailing may be cute or funny or simply convenient, but the fact remains that those who can’t convey through the careful use of words and punctuation something said in jest without resorting to a winking or smiling emoji are limited in their ability to communicate. It’s a small sign, as Marshal McLuhan foresaw in the 1960s, that electronic age will usher in the post-literate age.
Although it may seem as though I’m making far too much of this harmless little phrase that has become popular recently, it’s important to keep in mind what Günther Anders, philosopher of technology, recognized in the 1950s: that the things that cause the greatest harm often appear as the most ordinary. In fact, I see the popularity of such phrases as 100% and literally and honestly as emblematic of a larger, societal shift toward an increasingly simplistic, grammatically ambiguous use of English that instead of freeing up expression only makes us more limited in our ability to articulate ourselves, that we have fewer words with which to express ourselves—and given the sophistication that ChatGPT can elicit answers far more sophisticated than what I see among the average college student, that’s a danger to keep in mind. It’s something I’d like to explore in other posts.
