"Not gonna lie"
« previous post | next post »
Kase Wickman, "Kylie Kelce Knocked Joe Rogan Off the Top Podcast Slot, In Just One Episode", Vanity Fair 12/10/2024:
Kylie Kelce, wife of Jason Kelce, sister-in-law of Travis Kelce, mother of three (with a fourth on the way), and Dunkin Donuts enthusiast, can add another descriptor to that incomplete list: No. 1 podcast host.
The debut of Kylie’s new podcast, Not Gonna Lie, has unseated Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience from its long-held perch atop the most-listened charts on both Apple and Spotify. The inaugural episode, featuring It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson as a guest, was published on December 5, with new episodes planned to drop each Thursday.
Not Gonna Lie retains the top spots in its second week — here's what the (top of the) Apple list looks like this morning:
"Not gonna lie", at least in that spelling, seems to be a relatively recent addition to the list of English discourse markers:
Though it's got a ways to go to catch up to "tell you the truth":
And both of them are still far behind "honestly", at least in the published books that Google NGrams monitors:
Obviously the Google Books NGram hits for all three searches will include many non-discourse-marker uses, but I think they probably capture the general trend in frequency of usage. A similar historical difference is implied by the fact that "tell you the truth" has a Wiktionary page, while "not gonna lie" is still without one.
Beating out Joe Rogan is a pretty big deal, politically as well as culturally. But the main linguistic point here is the evolution of the title phrase's meaning and use.
In general, increased frequency of use correlates with semantic bleaching (see e.g. "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; or "So", 12/26/2019) — in the cases under discussion, the implied contrast with explicit untruth gradually fades, letting some other pragmatically-associated meaning(s) become stronger.
The Wiktionary entry for "honestly" glosses its Interjection use as "Used to express exasperation, dismay, etc.", with the example "Honestly! I want to finish this work and you keep interrupting."
In the case of "not gonna lie", what's left seems to be mainly a sense of gossipy friendliness, associated with some information that might have been omitted in a less intimate setting. The opening of Kylie Kelce's inaugural podcast:
And similarly the second week's opening:
Update — Ben Zimmer notes in the comments that
Back in 2017, FiveThirtyEight created a Google Ngrams-style visualizer of word frequency on Reddit. You can see the rapid rise of "NGL" there.
Unfortunately the cited visualizer ends on 7/31/2017, and has apparently not since been updated. It does show a rapid rise of NGL's frequency from 2013 onwards:
but the rise of TBH over the same period is about 70 times greater (graph shows 1/1/2010 to 7/31/2017):
Whether NGL has caught up in the past 7+ years is unclear…
J.W. Brewer said,
December 16, 2024 @ 7:56 am
My sense is that The Young People Today also frequently use the textspeak-style initialism "ngl" or "NGL" for "not gonna lie" whereas I don't personally have the impression that TYTT or what have you is in comparable use. So you might want to include the initialism form in searches to get a better sense of comparative prevalence.
Consider also "Frankly," as an alternative to "Honestly," where even unbleached the antonym of frankness is perhaps not literal dishonesty, but the function of the discourse marker is quite similar.
Mark Liberman said,
December 16, 2024 @ 8:42 am
@J.W. Brewer:
In the sources I've checked (except reddit), NGL mostly stands for "natural gas liquids". And reddit doesn't easily give up counts…
And at least in recent decades, "honestly" has been outpacing "frankly" on Google Books NGrams…
There's also TBH = "to be honest", and of course there's a reddit discussion of what the difference is between TBH and NGL. Although most of the responses suggest that there's no difference, I don't think "To Be Honest" would work as the title for Kaylie Kelce's podcast. It doesn't seem as positive, friendly, and inviting.
practik said,
December 16, 2024 @ 9:24 am
Well, there's this source: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/ngl
I suppose bleaching is also behind the displacement of "to be honest" by "if I'm [being] honest," which conveys a greater sense of "I'm going to drop my guard for a moment and share something intimate (more than likely about myself)." In that sense it has some similarity to "not gonna lie," but to my mind the latter, pace Cambridge, is at least as likely to preface hot takes as awkward revelations.
Jerry Packard said,
December 16, 2024 @ 10:47 am
Right up there among the most common has to be ‘trust me.’
J.W. Brewer said,
December 16, 2024 @ 10:54 am
I imagine that in any given discourse context it's pretty easy to tell whether NGL means "natural gas liquids" versus "not gonna lie,"* but I do appreciate that the sort of tools intended to do automated corpus linguistics searches may not be able to draw that distinction reliably. OTOH, if the searching tool is case-sensitive, lowercase "ngl" seems much more likely to be "not gonna lie" because these textspeak-style initialisms often tend to deviate from the usual convention of putting acronyms/initialisms in ALLCAPS. Or at least some do. "ngl" seems as or more cromulent than "NGL," while "otoh" seems a bit weird as an alternative for "OTOH." Both "LOL" and "lol" seem fine. Is there a literature on this subtle point?
*Not to mention Next-Generation Lithography or Nationwide Gravesite Locator.
Vance Koven said,
December 16, 2024 @ 11:37 am
There's a similar throat-clearing expression, "truth to tell," that has experienced a similar trajectory, but which seems to have peaked in 2014 and sagged a bit since.
Ben Zimmer said,
December 16, 2024 @ 2:03 pm
Back in 2017, FiveThirtyEight created a Google Ngrams-style visualizer of word frequency on Reddit. You can see the rapid rise of "NGL" there.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/reddit-ngram/?keyword=ngl&start=20071015&end=20170731&smoothing=10
[(myl) See the update at the end of the original post.]
Roscoe said,
December 16, 2024 @ 4:50 pm
From “The Simpsons”:
“I’m not going to lie to you, Marge…So long!” [runs off]
Jonathan Smith said,
December 16, 2024 @ 7:50 pm
Although surely back in the day "not gonna lie" meant "to be totally blunt" i.e. "here comes a harsh but real assessment." So not so much overlap with "to tell the truth", which (among other uses) can often suggest rather "I'm baring my soul here." But not gonna lie, now "not gonna lie" can be used however you want if you don't fear the cringe.
Stephen Goranson said,
December 17, 2024 @ 6:47 am
As to varying expectations on reception of a claim,
or attempted framing of such,
compare "just sayin'."
Mark Liberman said,
December 17, 2024 @ 9:28 am
@Stephen Goranson: "As to varying expectations on reception of a claim, or attempted framing of such, compare "just sayin'.""
See "Just sayin'" (1/11/2012) and "Just sayin'" (8/4/2023).
Andrew Usher said,
December 19, 2024 @ 9:09 am
I'm going to have to refrain on saying anything about her or whether she truly is 'not gonna lie' … but that use of the phrase is nowhere near normal for me, and unless part of an answer to a question, sounds weirdly confrontational. As has been noted the equivalent in more traditional/normal English is 'honestly' or 'frankly', whose primary meaning appears to be the same, agreeing with Jonathan Smith's
> Although surely back in the day "not gonna lie" meant "to be totally blunt" i.e. "here comes a harsh but real assessment." So not so much overlap with "to tell the truth", which (among other uses) can often suggest rather "I'm baring my soul here."
and while 'to tell the truth' can be different, it can also be the same, and probably is if I ever use it. But 'trust me', even when followed by a statement with a truth value, is quite different in emphasis, in a fairly obvious way.
/df said,
December 27, 2024 @ 2:18 pm
In UK politics a more formal version is "I want to be very clear that …", usually followed by a lie or questionable or incomprehensible proposition. Or "We have been very clear that …" which normally means "We have lied or obfuscated about …"
The topic phrase would sound most natural in UK English in a regional dialect: "I'm not gonna lie, but that Finale of Gavin and Stacey was right lush".