"I hate you"

[koganbot]

"I hate you"

Person A says to Person B, "I hate you." Is it more likely that Person A is:

(1) expressing affection?

or

(2) expressing hostility?

Let's posit that A and B are each over twenty years old, and that they're speaking English. This is all we know. "More likely" means "probability of at least 50.1%."

Although "expressing a mixture of affection and hostility" is a reasonable third option, I'm not allowing it. Just pick (1) or (2).

See comments.

Comments

All the sweet, green icing flowing down

[koganbot]

I could probably think up many more scenarios for number 2 (expressing hostility) than for number 1: B espouses destructive politics, B marries the woman or man of A's dreams, B taunts and humiliates A, B says something negative about Ashlee Simpson, etc.

Nonetheless, I think number 1, expressing affection, is way way way way WAY more likely.

Another manner of asking the question would have been: "Take all the instances last year where someone says to someone else, 'I hate you.' Do you think there were more cases where this was an expression of affection or more cases where this was an expression of hostility?" For some reason I think such wording might have pushed people more in the direction of "affection" than the way I did phrase it. (Putting "affection" first also may do that a little, I'd guess. My simply asking the question probably jostles people in that direction anyway, they wondering what answer I'm looking for.)

Off the top of my head, the only scenarios that spring to mind for number 1 (expressing affection) are affectionate responses to bad jokes. E.g., people are inside watching TV, it's raining hard out, a torrential downpour. Person B suddenly gasps and says, "I left the cake outside!" Person A says, "I hate you."* But I believe these are very common. What they lack in variety they make up for in amount.

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The reason I specified "over twenty" is that children are more likely than adults to say to people whom they hate (and to people they're momentarily peeved at), "I hate you." I specified "English" because that's the only language I know, and I don't assume that every other language has a word with connotations and usage that are identical to the English "hate." (Not that "hate" necessarily has the same connotations and usage everywhere English is spoken. My question implies a range of connotations anyway, even for an individual speaker.)

Of course, expressing affection does not automatically mean that I feel affection. I could be dissembling, pretending to express affection by saying "I hate you," when actually I hate you. Still, dissemblings or lack of dissemblings, I think "I hate you" is more commonly used to express affection than to express hostility.

*Actually, she didn't say "I hate you." She simply started hitting me, as I continued with, "I don't think that I can take it, 'cause it took so long to bake it, and I'll never have that recipe again." Jim, at that point, chimed in with, "Oh, no."

Re: All the sweet, green icing flowing down

[koganbot]

Here's the link to that video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHS8hj4TdT8

[petronia.livejournal.com]

I would say 1. The cases that come to mind are "affectionate response to domestic/friendly nagging re: responsibilities, or any other conversation where interlocutee is unanswerably right about something unpleasant, but 'I hate you' is a way of indicating that interlocutor recognizes and accepts this".

For 2, the most common usage seems to be "I really hate you sometimes" said seriously, i.e. "sometimes you drive me completely bonkers, and this is a problem". Which in a way also presupposes affection, or at least a relationship that both people want to fix.

I guess the pattern is that people don't say "I hate you" out loud to others they genuinely hate, only to others they care about or at least are stuck with. Which I think is true for children under 20, too.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Hate actually kind of implies an emotional vulnerability, so if you admit to someone you truly hate that you hate them, all they have to say is "I don't care what you feel about me and I feel nothing about you," and you have no comeback -- you've lost the fight, because you've lost your cool.

[koganbot]

Kids will say it to someone they're genuinely mad at, as a word that's at hand. And they may mean it in the moment, but it's still likely to be someone they do feel affection towards at other moments. I can also imagine/recall kids saying it to someone they ostracize or bully, and they're saying it to hurt the person. But they most likely won't be hating the person as they say it, except where there's some real dark displacement going on. Normally you don't hate someone you can get away with saying "I hate you" to.

I would say that, in songs, "I hate you" is usually meant as "I hate you," and is often considered an achievement ("I used to love you but now I..."). But whether the "you" that's addressed in songs is actually present and being addressed (in fictional Song-Words World) is often unclear.

I haven't done a survey to back this up (or any of my assertions in this post/on this thread).

Again, without actually having researched this, I hypothesize that when Guthrie and Seeger and Dylan and those types were doing topical protest songs, they were transforming popular music from quasi-fiction to nonfiction (even when they were singing story songs where they'd obviously made up the stories, using emblematic characters). So the singer is presenting himself or herself as actually believing in the opinions and sentiments of the song in the very moment of singing it.* And the link between the folk song movement and singer-songwriter "folk" music that spun off from it is that the latter would often retain this sense of nonfiction. Joni was often singing about real people, or so I assumed, anyway. That singer-songwriter music got called "folk music" too is logically ridiculous (how is it music of the folk?) but makes emotional sense. And this affected rock and punk and much of popular music from there.

(I think there might be a path from gospel to "nonfiction" too, but at the moment that's just a hazy thought. But when James Brown got topical I doubt it was owing to his having listened to folk protest songs. I wonder if Curtis Mayfield and the like were influenced by both (gospel and protest).)

Not that folk protest itself didn't have elements coming from gospel and spirituals.

I've run far afield from my original topic. But when Dylan sang "I hope that you die" in "Masters Of War," it was shocking (at least to me) in a way that threats of murder in blues songs, for instance, weren't. E.g., Elvis singing, "I'd rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man," in "Baby, Let's Play House" is just everyday sentiments of the genre (even if people sometimes do feel that way). (The line is in Arthur Gunter's original, too (though as someone on the comment thread remarks, Elvis's version is from another world — one that Elvis was helping to invent, I and many others would add).)

*UPDATE: I'm sure what I wrote is unclear. When Frank Sinatra is singing "Love was just a glance away/A warm embracing dance away," he's not claiming that he feels this way right at the moment, or that he ever exactly felt this way, or that this ever exactly happened. Whereas when Dylan is saying to the masters of war, "I hope that you die," he's really saying (to us, the listeners) that he hopes these people die. Whether or not he's animated by that feeling when he's actually singing [he could be daydreaming, the words, say, having long since been memorized and repeated to the point where the delivery is almost unconscious], he's committing to the words as he's singing them.

Of course, Sinatra is committing to the style and ethos he's putting forth. In this sense, all of fiction can be topical nonfiction too, if you want to look at it this way.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

3) Expressing humor, which may not reflect the speaker's feeling towards the listener at at all.

As you said, people over twenty have usually gone through social conditioning about the harshness of the word "hate," and so don't use it as a straightforward sincere statement except as a last resort to elicit the maximum emotional impact.

But "I hate you" as a sarcastic response to anything can happen in any sort of casual situation, between two people who may not have any sort like or dislike for each other at all, but are merely going with conversation flow, "I hate you" being the punchline of that discussion thread.

[arbitrary-greay.livejournal.com]

For example, I now find myself in a position to watch "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" during my lunch break, and when a contestant wins fucking $25000 off of a simple question, I instinctively exclaim, "Son of a bitch!" in amused irritation. Sometimes I'll dryly remark, "I hate you so much now," and then forget about them as I go back to work.

[koganbot]

One thing "I hate you" illustrates is how normal and prevalent irony is (I assume this is true even back in the days when cave people were conversing with dinosaurs in the wingnuts' Eden).

[koganbot]

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http://www.kpoplyrics.net/eru-hate-you-lyrics-english-romanized.html

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

I wanna send fan mail to whoever wrote that translation. It's really beautifully written.

[koganbot]

They credit the pop!gasa site; so this is where the lyrics were first posted, if you want to say thank you on the comment thread:

http://popgasa.com/2012/08/07/eru-feat-yong-jun-hyung-of-beast-hate-you-미워요

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

Done! Only one comment on that post, which is sad, but maybe they're all awaiting moderation like mine.

hate wiggle room

[lostcosmonaut.livejournal.com]

option 1. One of my ex-girlfriends used to say that to me all th time, pretty much every day, basically every time I said something funny in a teasing way or something politically incorrect

When people mean "I hate you" they generally go for something like "fuck you"

--mza.

emigrating to estonia

[(Anonymous)]

Hey hey


Have a nice girl

By

I Hate You, Inanimate Carbon Rod

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Usually when I actually say "I hate you" aloud to another person, it's to my wife, but that's probably more about statistical likelihood, given that I say probably a good 70-90% of all words on a given day to my wife. I've probably used the phrase endearingly before, and I'm certain my wife has used it for me. I can't remember a single time I've said it to someone else, though, except maybe my sister when we used to fight. (Would guess that the people you say "I hate you" -- and mean it -- would almost have to be a close relation, probably family.)

But most of my use of "I hate you" is more likely expressing hostility toward inanimate objects. Computers, mostly. "LOAD! I *HATE* YOU, *LOAD*." I used to have some anger management issues that were expressed almost entirely at my videogames, which I would throw around, scream at, curse at, otherwise do terrible things to. I've stopped the screaming for the most part, but I still say "I hate you" to objects a lot, I think (when I use the phrase -- most often I "hate" ideas or situations, not people or things; "I hate it when..." or "I hate how...")