"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

[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.