"You will want to __"
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Email from a reader:
In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business, I have noticed a regular use of the FUTURE tense, when the present would perfectly suffice. Sometimes, but not always, this is combined with telling me what I WILL WANT to do. To wit,
– "you WILL WANT TO ____"
– "the beverages WILL BE on the back of the menu"
There is nothing "wrong" grammatically or logically with any of this (as if there could be). It is perfectly accurate and cromulent. But these forms are relatively new, I conjecture. Even a little jarring.
I can posit my own hypotheses regarding how and why these usages increased in prevalence in recent tears. Is there a literature on it, perhaps already covered by Language Log?
I should start by noting that some people object to calling the English word will a marker of "future tense" rather than a modal — see e.g. Rodney Huddleston's (I think convincing) article "The case against a future tense in English", Studies in Language 1995. Use of will often involves a hypothetical future time reference, as I think it does in examples like those in the email, but the asserted proposition is (often) also true at the time of speaking or reading, wherefore the will is (often) optional.
However, I'm skeptical of the idea that such usage is a Gen Z innovation, since similar things have been around for centuries.
For example, an article published in the NYT on 5/28/1894, under the headline "Buffalo Politicians Surprised", starts this way:
…and ends like this, informing readers that the relevant background "will be found on page 9":
That story was in fact found on page 9 of that edition, so it would also have been appropriate to write that "The story of Sheriff Beck's removal is found on Page 9". The force of the modal "will" is to imply something like "If you care to look…" — it's not a prediction about the future as of May 1894.
And an 1846 Report on the Present State of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal tells us that the "The Baltimore and Ohio Rail-road Company, in the page of their report referred to, represent that actual cost of carrying coal on their road from the mines to Baltimore, will be, to them, per ton, per mile, 1 046/1000 cents", so that "This, for the distance of 188 miles, will be $1 966/1000":
These hypothetical costs are presented as an estimate of the actual costs as of 1846, if anyone cared to arrange such a shipment, so that "will be" could logically have been replaced by "is".
I don't know of any discussion of this particular question in the scholarly literature, beyond what's implied in papers like Huddleston's.
Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Usage has nothing but a few pages on shall vs. will. But there's quite a bit of relevant stuff in the English usage internet, e.g. "What does 'you will want to' mean?", or "You will want vs. you want", or "'You'll find that…'".
Even though things like this have been around in English for a long time, it still could be true that Gen Z people (those born between 1997 and 2012) use them more frequently, in general or in certain contexts. But this isn't something that I've noticed, and I'm not sure how to check it.
jin defang said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:33 pm
much this is just what I can "word-stretching"—why not just said "the story continues of p. whatever rather than "will be found on"?
sometimes, however, the "will" is a not-too-subtle order to do something. "Students will want to make sure that all their data are backed up. The university is not responsible for…" kind of thing.
VVOV said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:46 pm
In "the beverages will be on the back of the menu", my intuition is that "will" functionally serves as a politeness marker, casting the sentence into a restaurant service-y register that is slightly fancier than "the beverages are on the back of the menu".
In "you will want to [verb]", the more salient thing to me is the use of "want" to mean "ought/should", which is somewhat uncommon but is certainly not new or due to Gen Z. For example, it's in Merriam Webster's entry on "want", with the the example "You want to be very careful what you say." Perhaps the innovation being highlighted by the OP is the use of this "want" in a positive/helpful/polite context, when it's more traditionally used in an admonition like the M-W example sentence.
Terry K. said,
June 9, 2025 @ 12:46 pm
Two thoughts.
It occurs to me that there doesn't necessarily have to be one single answer as to whether or not "will" should be considered as a future tense auxiliary. We've different dialects and registers in the language, after all.
Also, Google Books Ngram Viewer shows generally increasing instances of "will want to" over time, but not with a pattern suggesting it's something new with Gen Z.
Gregory Kusnick said,
June 9, 2025 @ 1:03 pm
One might quibble and say that the story was in fact printed on page 9, where it would be found by any reader who looked. But at the time of publication, no reader had looked yet; hence "will be found".
Mai Kuha said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:04 pm
I'm aligned with VVOV's intuition of "will" as a politeness marker. Don't longer utterances tend to be more polite than shorter ones? The motivation could be that a longer utterance is evidence of going to more effort, ostensibly to the addressee's benefit.
I still remember a day in 1999 when a university administrator called my office asking for my predecessor. When I identified myself as a new hire, she said "You want to change your outgoing voice mail message". That seemed rude to me, and "will want" would have been a little better, although ultimately it was still a false statement.
I would also speculate about a separate motivation for "The beverages will be…": could this pattern with the unnecessary "located" in e.g. "The remote is located in the drawer"? I've thought that maybe "located" (and, now, "will") is supposed to facilitate processing for a listener, to rule out more quickly the excessive syntactic categories that can follow a BE verb ("The beverages will be here/free/coffee or tea/appearing/charged to your room").
GeorgeW said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:17 pm
FWIW, another vote for politeness marker. And, the politieness could be stepped up a notch with the past tense.
It is found.
It will be found. (when you look)
It would be found. (if you wished to look)
Philip Taylor said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:19 pm
I was going to say much the same as Gregory Kusnick, but would have proposed "can be found", since "will" implies some degree of prescience …
Philip Taylor said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:22 pm
And to Mai … I would have been inclined to reply (somewhat shortly) "I don't yet have an outgoing voice mail message — the message to which you have just listened belonged to my predecessor".
Lillie Dremeaux said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:35 pm
I heard this construction much more often in the U.K., where I lived 2015-2021. I recall asking a colleague whether a few food items in the office fridge were company-provided or brought in by individuals; her reply was "Those will belong to someone!"
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:46 pm
I broadly agree with Gregory Kusnick but note the classic problem of a passive-voice construction that is Vague About Agency. The sentence "the story … will be found on page 9" doesn't answer the obvious question "found by whom?" If it's thought of as a recasting of the similarly polite-to-officious-sounding "you will find the [relevant] story on page 9," it's a correct prediction about the future, at least given the plausible assumptions that you haven't yet looked at page 9 but will do so subsequently.
Re the politeness-market analysis, I think it's actually a little more complicated – "you will want X" is pushier, and thus less polite, than "you may want X," but obviously less pushy than a flat-out declaration that "you want X" (whether you realize it or not!) and I think less pushy than "you should want X," although why the "will" construction feels less pushy than the "should" construction is not immediately clear to me (i.e. my intuition is pretty strong on this but I can't immediately explain why it follows from more general principles). In sum, I think the idea is to find something that sounds pushier than "you may want X" but not move so far up the pushiness spectrum that the pushiness becomes counterproductive because it alienates the listener. An optimization problem.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
I should note that "politeness-market" in my just-posted comment was a damnyouautocorrectism for "politeness-marker," but maybe it has possibilities that the behavioral economists will want to look into.
David Morris said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
There's a Doonesbury cartoon to this effect, which I will have no chance of finding over breakfast (or maybe at all).
Laura Morland said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:38 pm
I'll take the contrarian point of view, at least in the context of Millenials (and maybe also GenZ restaurant servers):
Q: "What's in X dish?"
A: "It's gonna be …"
Found this question online:
"The table IS right this way; it is not “going to be” right this way. The specials tonight ARE; they are not “going to be.” The price IS $35; it is not “going to be” $35. When and how and why did this happen to American service language?
— Pamela Paul (@PamelaPaulNYT) February 6, 2018
The response:
"Paul’s tweet, which took aim at the particular way servers say a table is going to be right this way rather than simply is this way, was promptly ratioed (receiving many responses and few cosigns), and the editor was roundly mocked as the elitist avatar for everything that’s wrong with the New York Times.
[…]
In this specific case, the shift to “is going to be” that Paul decries isn’t really a shift at all. As one Twitter user coined it, the “culinary future” tense is very common, and in any case likely not a choice made by staff but one made at a management level. Saying that the foie gras is going to be served with winter squash and pumpkin seeds is just a slightly less formal version of the traditional construction “madam, the foie gras will be served with winter squash and pumpkin seeds this evening,” or “yes sir, your table will be right this way.” It’s a grammatical flourish that builds anticipation and excitement and, perhaps more important, seeks continuing customer buy-in. The unspoken message is that this action or that situation will happen if you choose to continue your dining experience with us. Which, even if you don’t love the sound of it, is a fundamentally polite gesture.
Like most fine dining etiquette, this “culinary future” tic can be a bit annoying for the average customer."
https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/02/food-service-grammar-is-perfectly-polite.html
Len said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:44 pm
On the Toronto subway system Route 1, when I expect to hear "will" from the robotic voice, I hear "to," as in "Next stop Bloor. Doors to open on the right." After several years and several thousand door openings, I have yet to satisfactorily explain to myself why the voice is avoiding "will." But I'm irritated every time.
Gregory Kusnick said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:46 pm
A charitable interpretation of "That's gonna be over here," at least in casual conversation, might be something like "When we find it, that's where it's gonna turn out to have been all along."
Bruce Rusk said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:59 pm
There's a longstanding polite use of "will" that you [will] find, for instance, in courtroom and parliamentary usage: "the gentleman will please state his point of order…" Here's an example from Boston city council in 1884: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Reports_of_Proceedings/G_xCAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%22gentleman%20will%20please%22&pg=PA212-IA75&printsec=frontcover
Google books finds lots of 18th century examples, but often with "please to…"
JPL said,
June 9, 2025 @ 5:03 pm
I always liked these examples (and I'm sure there are more, but these are the ones right off the top):
1. "That will be the postman." (Said by someone in the house sitting in a chair to someone else in the house on their feet, responding to a doorbell ring. The ringer is at present standing there outside.)
2. "There will have been casualties." (I remember Margaret Thatcher intoning this sentence emphatically to the press after a battle in the Falklands war. If there were casualties, they would have been past wrt the utterance.)
These indicate what is going on here, since 'will' belongs to the system of modality, not tense.
Julian Hook said,
June 9, 2025 @ 5:40 pm
Decades ago, I noticed that many sports announcers had a habit of using the future tense (or whatever you call constructions with "will") for no apparent reason: "That will be a foul on Jordan" (when obviously the foul was committed and called before the announcer uttered the statement), or "That's gonna be a foul ball" (it already is).
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 7:00 pm
Note that JPL's examples would be boringly and literally "true" if they were phrased as "That will turn out to be the postman" and "There will turn out to have been casualties" (in the latter case assuming that the Prime Minister has not yet been fully briefed on the details but anticipates at a general level what that briefing is highly likely to say). That the shorter forms given are understood as meaning the same thing may be evidence of something interesting, but I'm not entirely sure if it's about modality versus tense. The contrast is between the timing of a thing-being-true-in-the-world independent of our direct knowledge/perception of it (already occurring right now in the present) and the timing of us-definitely-confirming-that-that-thing-is-true-in-the-world (still in the future, albeit perhaps the near future).
I suppose you can say that this is a form of evidentiality-marking, and in English evidentiality is often mixed up with the use of modal verbs, but I'm not sure that's the end of the analysis since the evidentiality being marked is an expectation that stronger evidence for the assertion will be forthcoming in the near future.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 7:12 pm
Separately, I appreciate myl's link to the Huddleston (1995) article. I could perhaps falsely claim relevant subject-matter expertise, given that some years before 1995 I wrote my senior essay as a linguistics major on the interesting (so I thought) phenomenon that many IE languages (I can't recall if I only focused on Germanic ones, though that was certainly the primary focus) used modal/auxiliary verbs for the language-specific periphrastic constructions usually called (perhaps imprecisely) their "future tense," but different languages used different verbs for that purpose* – indeed prescriptive/schoolmarm English uses two different ones (shall versus will, depending on context). Unfortunately my actual work was long on very superficial description and very short on any incisive analysis.
*Unsurprising in one sense in that these constructions had all evolved late in the game after the breakup of relevant proto-languages, but still interesting in that they had reached different conclusions about which of the range of semantic concepts associated with the standard inventory of modal verbs was the best fit for futurity rather than all converging on a single optimal analogy.
JPL said,
June 9, 2025 @ 8:07 pm
"That the shorter forms given are understood as meaning the same thing …."
Roughly, but I would rather say, "the senses of the two sentences (in the pairs) are equivalent with respect to __ [to be specified], but not equivalent in all respects." Specifying the areas of equivalence and non-equivalence would be illuminating, as well as the differences with "That's the postman." and "Most likely there were casualties." BTW, sentences with epistemic modals are usually not considered to be judgeable true or false (they are "non-factive"); they focus a future epistemic event which will determine truth or falsity with relation to the situation referred to by the main verb (explicitly expressed by "turn out to be"). A description of an event that may or may not occur in the future can not really be judged true or false at the time of speaking; an attempted reference to it typically will involve degrees of possibility or evidentiality. "That may be the postman."
J.W. Brewer said,
June 9, 2025 @ 9:02 pm
JPL's introduction of "non-factive" seems to slide from linguistics into some sort of speculative philosophy. Undergraduates who have just read David Hume for the first time may well contend that "the sun will rise tomorrow" is a non-factive statement. How accurate any given speaker's predictions of the future are or aren't seems to me a question outside the scope of grammatical analysis (not unlike the question of how accurate any given speaker's descriptions of the present or past are), unless the prediction uses the available resources of the relevant language to explicitly hedge in its phrasing and thus signal that the prediction is admittedly uncertain. As in "that may be the postman" versus "that will be the postman."
Jonathan Smith said,
June 9, 2025 @ 9:05 pm
This doesn't seem necessarily to involve will — any variant "you [will] want to / ya(l) wanna" is of late fine for "one must needs…", e.g., "ya wanna press harder if ya wanna get their attention." The newer of these two wants isn't presumptuous / imputing listener's psychological state IMO; it's friendlylike.
Ambarish Sridharanarayanan said,
June 9, 2025 @ 11:19 pm
Ought to be filed under "Peeving", methinks.
Philip Taylor said,
June 10, 2025 @ 4:33 am
"In the last several years, when receiving instructive information from gen Z in places of business" — I would be interested to know what fraction of regular readers of Language Log would be able to identify a "gen Z" person in a place of business. For myself (a baby-boomer), I have absolutely no idea what age range "gen Z" encompasses as of the date of writing, nor would I be able to place even a tentative upper- and/or lower-bound on any of the other "gen[eration] …s" that are so frequently bandied around today. I do not even know the approximate upper and lower bounds on my own (baby boomer) generation — I simply know "I am one". Am I alone ?
GeorgeW said,
June 10, 2025 @ 5:45 am
@ Philip Taylor: According to Wikipedia:
"Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years with the generation loosely being defined as people born around 1997 to 2012."
Maybe the most siginifant feature of the group is,"As the first social generation to have grown up with access to the Internet and portable digital technology from a young age, . . ."
Philip Taylor said,
June 10, 2025 @ 7:10 am
OK, but did you know that before (or without) consulting Wikipedia, George ? That was the crux of my question, not what the actual (or defined) bounds are …
J.W. Brewer said,
June 10, 2025 @ 7:11 am
@Philip Taylor: I think of these generation-labels and some of the associated conceptual apparatus as very American in origin but obviously American fads can spread such that usage or at least passive understanding of the labels might be as high in the UK. Or might not be.
There's potentially a trans-Atlantic translation problem with "baby boom[er]" because the literal post-WW2 baby boom (variation over time in birth rate) did not have exactly the curve in the UK as the US in terms of what year it peaked and what subsequent year the decline became marked rather than gradual and thus led demographers to talk up a "baby bust" – the UK peak-and-decline was several years later than in the U.S. Since the cut-off date for which year-of-birth is the last to qualify as a "Boomer" is inherently fuzzy/arbitrary if expressed in "cultural" terms, the default in U.S. contexts when needing a precise definition has ended up being what you would pick from just eyeballing the birth-rate-by-year graph and picking the first noticeably steep year-to-year decline. That's an even more arbitrary cutoff when applied to other countries where the graph looks different, but even in the U.S. it leads to arbitrary borderline situations where e.g. former Vice President Harris, who was born less than nine months before I was, can be labeled an Official Boomer while I cannot be. (FWIW in a less precise cultural sense I think it is much clearer that I am not a Boomer than that she is.
David Marjanović said,
June 10, 2025 @ 7:47 am
These strike me as something much closer to home: will used for probability statements about the present – "I suppose they belong to someone", "that must be the postman", "it stands to reason that there have been casualties".
That's common with the supposed future tense of German, and in my dialect it's even the only meaning of that construction (future is instead expressed as present + "then" or a specific time).
That could be intended as future: "that will be adjudicated to be a foul ball once the umpire is done with it".
I did because it's in the last paragraph of the OP.
(…and "OP" means "opening post of this thread", as opposed to the comments)
Julian said,
June 10, 2025 @ 8:12 am
"your beverages will be on the back of the menu"
If that's a politeness marker, the consequential question of interest is why it becomes so.
Similarly, the tense in "did you want another cup of coffee?" is used as a politeness marker, but I have trouble thinking of a good psychological reason why it is so. (But maybe the implication is "I've come to answer a desire which I suspect you have already formed.")
"That will be the postman" is different because "will" is an uncertainty marker (="that's probably the postman").
There's no uncertainty about whether the beverages are on the back of the menu.
Yves Rehbein said,
June 10, 2025 @ 9:26 am
Compare the German cognates wählen, Wahl, Auswahl, Menüauswahl, "selection": the beverages-will be on the back of the menu-will – in tact a polite subjunctive.
Tim Leonard said,
June 10, 2025 @ 9:51 am
An ngrams comparison of "can be found,will be found,are found,is found,are to be found" shows the biggest trend the rise in "can be found" compared to any of the others.
Cheryl Thornett said,
June 10, 2025 @ 11:35 am
'You're going to/ gonna', sometimes + want to, is very much a feature of the more discursive online recipes. My grumpy old woman response is 'No, I'm not', whereas the more traditional recipe instruction forms don't provoke that. 'You may want to' for alternatives is fine. I increasingly use the 'jump to recipe' button where provided in any case. It's a minor irritation, partly the irritation of clichéd usage, after all.
The modals generally have multiple uses, and 'will' includes prediction and probability as well as time, intention and a marker of politeness. A frequent point of confusion for EFL/EEL students.
Adrian Bailey said,
June 10, 2025 @ 2:48 pm
It's unfortunate that most people, including the reader quoted in the post, are taught that "will" is the English future tense. Or unfortunate if they're not also taught that that is a simplification.
I refer to "will" as the modal of certainty, ie. the "strongest" of the modals, unless we also count "to be to" as a modal. This then encompasses its uses as a future indicator.
Sentences like
You will already know this.
He will have arrived yesterday.
Will she be there already?
are normal, so shouldn't be surprising.
In this context, a sentence like "I will let you know" is less about the future and more about the fact that something is (supposedly) definitely happening, compared with eg. "I might let you know" (which is no less about the future than the "I will" version).
Chas Belov said,
June 10, 2025 @ 7:07 pm
@J.W. Brewer
I took a course once on emotional self-control, where the instructor asserted that "should" is a word meant to shame us, and the proper response to "you should have done x" was "I shouldn't have done x because I didn't do x and it's about y percent bad."
David Marjanović said,
June 11, 2025 @ 10:09 am
That's not the cognate of will, it's the cognate of what once was its causative. The exact cognate is wollen "want", as in ich will "I want".
That's why wählen is regular: wählte, gewählt.
Yves Rehbein said,
June 11, 2025 @ 5:58 pm
cf. swell, swole and geschwollen, causative of the noun Schwiele, and I have heard will rhyme with wheel, real, too. The proper comparison must be wühl (ü /y/) as in Wühltisch, Grabbeltisch, which brings us to schwül, schwul und thus back to swole. There's been some mergers and, whatchamacallit, mix ups.
wallen, as Pfeifer compares s.v. schwellen, is not causative. Wälzen would be anticausative, of weather as for schwül ("wirdt der himmel so schnell umbgeweltzt, dasz die welt zerbreche volksbuch vom dr. Faust 44 Braune" [DWb]), see also welken ~ to wilt.
Yves Rehbein said,
June 11, 2025 @ 6:59 pm
Correction: wallen s.v. wühlen.
Schwellen is uncertain to Pfeifer (Old English swyle s.v. Schwiele). Schwül, schwelen, are comparable to Helios, Sol.
Wahl is an inner Germann formation and English has no immediate cognate to the verb. So it's fairly likely that it merged with will, after all: to will somebody – causative.
Not to to be confused with German jemanden wollen "to wool somebody" – that's choosative.
F said,
June 13, 2025 @ 6:31 am
"… will be found on page 9". Obviously, at the time this was written, page 9 hadn't been set.
I'll get my coat …
Philip said,
June 15, 2025 @ 5:56 am
I'm quite sure I heard this use of "you will want to" or "you're gonna want to" in the 90s before Gen Z was even born.