I am at an ice cream stand, one spot away from placing my order. Ahead of me a father of four little kids passes along a smorgasbord of ice cream orders that were, moments ago, passed along to him by a teenage boy who works behind the ice cream window. The father wisely pulls gobs and gobs of napkins from the napkin dispenser, then grabs his own shake and begins to walk away — but not before relaying to the teenager the following sincere message: “I appreciate you!”
I step forward and place my order and ponder what I will say when it is my turn to show gratitude for receiving a small vanilla cone topped with rainbow sprinkles.
I go old school and say, “Thank you!”
Since the ice cream stand experience, I have heard more and more people saying, “I appreciate you,” in real life and in fictional life. For example, you can’t watch many minutes of the television series “Ted Lasso” without hearing Ted say, “I appreciate you!” to someone who’s done the smallest service, like holding a door open.
But Ted is from the South, and what he says sounds more like “Preciate ‘cha!”
What do people mean when they say, “I appreciate you”? My question led me to a website called English Language and Usage. Here, to my surprise, I discovered a conversation that occurred nearly 12 years earlier. On Sept. 14, 2013, Howard P. inquired whether anyone had heard the phrase and knew its origins. He further reflected that it seems “like they are emphasizing more the ‘you’ than the deed? People often look me in the eye when they say this.”
Later on Sept. 14, 2013, user Cornbread Ninja responded to Howard P. with the following insight. People who say “I appreciate you” are not “appreciating that, they appreciate you having done that. It wouldn’t have happened without you. In that transfer, they are thanking you for existing and having the motive and opportunity to do that thing you did.”
Reading Cornbread Ninja’s post made me feel bad about how I had treated the teenager who had accurately written down my order and then successfully and carefully conveyed from his hand to my hand an ice cream cone on a warm, sunny day.
All I did was say, “Thank you.”
The father in front of me had thanked him for coming into existence. He had offered gratitude for his parents meeting and producing offspring, and for their parents meeting and producing offspring, and on and on back through the eons of time and space. The father had looked into the mystery of cosmic chances and seen that everything had miraculously aligned to produce a competent person standing and taking orders at an ice cream stand. The father had seen it. And it was good.
More than three years after the initial post on English Language and Usage, user ARkansauce made this helpful comment on Sept. 22, 2016: “I, having lived most of my life in the American South, have heard this expression a lot (though I would tend to spell and pronounce it ‘Preeshee-a-chuh.’ … I think it’s very typical of Southern warmth and friendliness. It always seemed to me friendlier to express an appreciation for the actor, as opposed to just the action itself.”
As we reach the end of the column I write and the column you are nearly done reading, I stop to consider what I should appreciate more — you, the reader, or the action of reading. I think I’ll just end by both proverbially having and eating my ice cream cone with rainbow sprinkles.
Thank you!
Preshee-a-chuh!
