👉 Right, settle down now, settle down! Let’s tackle this…
thing
. People whine about the youth of today and their baffling vernacular. And honestly? Some of that baffling stuff is absolutely brilliant. Let't dissect, then, what we call...
"Who-knows?"
Now, before you immediately clutch your pearls, let me assure you, it's not a typo! Unless you really don’t know what I was about to say. Historically (and here I'm pulling from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, mind you—the word itself is probably older), "Who-knows?" started as essentially a very emphatic way to admit ignorance – it’s the verbal equivalent of throwing your head back in exasperation. You basically say, with considerable shrug and a degree of frankly dramatic doubt: "Honestly? I genuinely have absolutely no freaking clue! It could be anything! The void stares blankly upon us!" What cemented its weird little niche as slang, however, wasn't the original meaning. Instead, around 2008, it started being deployed to express a kind of cynical, almost bored nonchalance. You throw in "Who-knows?" when you don’t actually want to think about the answer. It’s a dismissal that's somehow simultaneously annoyed and… vaguely amused? There's this little undercurrent of, "
