Language: “I Know, Right?”

Vacation-bound on an airplane, I heard a woman behind me say, approximately 732 times in a twenty-minute conversation, “I know, right?”

I didn’t realize how long that annoying, meaningless phrase has been around. Researching it, I found this 2011 episode from Jerry Scott’s and Jim Borgman’s comic strip Zits.

Further investigation disclosed that the phrase appeared even earlier, in the 2004 motion picture Mean Girls. Some experts credit the movie with infusing the phrase into the language. It may not be too late for the film makers to refute the charge and clear their names.