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 idioms 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 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 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 incessant repetition of this phrase), and the Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum of language: literally, honestly, and their offspring: 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 or stupid. 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 makes you feel good at the moment, especially if a sizable number is next to it.
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But after a few weeks, the novelty wore off and I already grew weary of 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: phatic verbal reflexes that not only say little but, like so much else of what we encounter today, is of dubious sincerity and little more the auto-fill of speech. Far from a sign of originality, this phrase is really a reflection of the broader culture and 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 much more emphatically that there is no wiggle-room for nuance, subtlety, complexity, exception, or compromise 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. 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 suffers from shortened attention spans and eschews complexity and difficulty but valorizes brevity, convenience, efficiency, and “plain-and-simple English,” 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 not just a number but a percentage also seems to underscore the extent to which numbers—data—play in the way we perceive the world around us. Nearly every aspect of our lives—the algorithms that keep track of us; our preoccupation with the number of likes, followers, friends, downloads, views, and shares on social media; the number of stars we assign to almost every transaction or service we encounter; the grades that students value more highly than what they learn; our obsession with tracking the minutiae of every aspect of our health; the endless stats and polls that fill the news; not to mention the financial and economic numbers we all fret over—has become increasingly dominated by a veritable spreadsheet of numerical figures that preoccupy our thinking, tell us what is good and determine how we should think and act.
As Walter Ong has argued, our tools shape our consciousness, so it’s not surprising, therefore, that our speech should be influenced in this way. One hundred percent is a good number. It’s like the very building blocks of computer language with its infinitesimal combination of one’s and zero’s; and 100% is the simplest of codes: one-zero-zero. The irony, however, is that as computers “learn” to speak like humans, we are learning to speak like computers; and in our technologically driven world, 100% means your computer is fully updated and protected against all viruses and malware; 100% means an app has completely downloaded and is ready to use; 100% means that your phone battery 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 thereby suggests that a number is a better substitute for and communicates more clearly than words. Most significantly, it’s a response that would have been incomprehensible in an earlier decade or century.
So what are the words that this phrase has supplanted? “Absolutely,” “Oh yeah, for sure,” “Without a doubt,” “No question,” “Certainly,” “Of course,” “Don’t worry”—plus any number of other phrases unique to a particular context. Perhaps some of these expressions have lost their credibility; perhaps we have come to doubt their value or earnestness the way many of us have grown to distrust much of what we hear. Or perhaps it’s a reflection of a culture that is constantly texting and tapping on keys: just as thumbing out full words and sentences on one’s phone or hitting the shift key is annoying and time consuming, speaking actual words and full sentences has similarly become just as troublesome and mentally taxing. (It’s one of the great ironies that with every increase in convenience brought about by some technological advancement, whatever labour remains is regarded as intolerably vexing.) Numbers, though, are both more reliable and instantaneous. As writers like Jacque Ellul and Neil Postman have described, modernity has given way to a world that values efficiency above all else, believes that technical calculation is superior to human judgment, sees subjectivity is an obstacle, and regards what can’t be measured as non-existent or a pseudo-problem.
Although it may appear as though I’m making far too much of this seemingly benign little phrase that has become popular recently, I see the prevalence of words like 100%, literally, and honestly as emblematic of a larger societal shift toward an increasingly simplistic, grammatically impoverished use of English that instead of freeing up expression only makes us more limited in our ability to articulate ourselves; and given the role that AI has begun to play in many of our lives with its ability to produce text that is, at once, far more sophisticated than what I’d ordinarily see from the average college student yet also extraordinarily banal, flat, and hollow-sounding, I expect our language will continue to change in strange and unexpected ways. It’s something I’d like to explore in other posts.
