It was never needed in the past and ads no context that a simple exclamation point or bold letters could do if a person wants to add emphasis.
OP, please follow rule 2.
Done and upvoted you for pointing out the lack of a question mark.
It’s a shortening of though. If you don’t understand how “though” works as a word, I honestly don’t know how to explain it. My best bet is to just absorb as much English as possible by watching TV and reading fiction.
Shouldn’t be a problem, tho.
It was never needed in the past
Citation needed.
Maybe. Citation needed, tho.
ftfy
Thank you, though
(Shameless self-promotion: if you like this subject, consider !linguistics@mander.xyz )
It’s being used as an adversative conjunction, connecting a phrase (usually a clause) with whatever precedes it, in a way that highlights that the precedent would incorrectly imply something.
Here are some examples showing it:
- “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. But it’s used at the end of the sentence.”
- “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence tho.”
- “That ‘tho’ is like a ‘but’. It’s used at the end of the sentence.”
Examples #1 and #2 are pretty much equivalent: the first sentence introduces an information (that “tho” is like a “but”), that information implies something incorrect (if “tho” is like a “but”, it would go at the start of the preceding sentence, right?), and the second sentence contradicts said implication (nope - it goes at the end). With the “but” or the “tho”, that contradiction is explicit.
Now look at #3 - it sounds like [incorrectly] saying that “but” goes at the end of the sentence, unlike #1 or #2.
The idea of a conjunction going after the elements being “conjoined” might sound a bit weird, but it’s worth noting that it’s nothing new. Latin for example used -que (additive conjunction; “and”) this way, it went after everything that you were joining. (Classical examples: “arma uirumque cano” [I sing the arms and men] and “Senatus Populusque Romanus” [Roman Senate and People].
Now, on why it’s being used this way: there’s the spelling and the increased usage.
“Tho” as a short form for “though” is actually old as fuck, with Merrian-Webster claiming that it was already uncommonly used in the 18xx. It can be seen as a short form that became more socially accepted nowadays, at least in informal writing. And in special, this sort of “grammatical word” (conjunctions, articles, adpositions, copula verb etc.) tends to be rather small, as you’ll use it all the time.
And the usage of “though” as an adversative conjunction is even older, being attested at the 12th century. Probably way older given that cognates in other Germanic languages also have the adversative meaning, even the Old Norse descendants like Icelandic.
I’m not sure on what I’m going to say, but I think that the increased modern usage is the result of some changes on how people interpret “but”. A lot of people have been treating “but” as if it contradicted completely the preceding discourse, like:
- Alice: “I wanted a banana pie. Not an apple pie.”
- Bob: “Why do you hate apples?”
- Alice: “I like apples, but I like bananas better.”
- Bob, who stopped hearing at the “but”: “THAN U DUN LIEK APPLES!”
That probably led to increased usage of “though” because it’s used after whatever you said the relevant piece of info.
@lvxferre there’s an old trend in New Zealand and Australia to put “but” at the end of a sentence too, but.
I catch myself doing that when speaking, and it always makes me feel stupid. It’s like the speaking part of the brain is waiting for the thinking part to add a counter-point, but the thinking part is just like “sorry, I got nothing”.
That’s interesting.
It might be a parallel development to address the same issue. It isn’t like people incorrectly interpreting what others say is a new thing.
Another possibility is that, initially, the “but” came as an afterthought, to highlight the contradiction. Then in Oz+Kiwi English it became frequent enough to be conventionalised. Like (reusing my example from the earlier comment):
- Alice: “I like apples. I like bananas better. … but.”
A third possibility would be that that “but” initially implied something that got clipped for succinctness. I find it a bit unlikely due to your example, but I’ve seen people doing it with Portuguese “mas” (but):
- Alice: “Gosto de maçãs. Mas…” [implicit: “prefiro bananas”]
- “I like apples. But…” [implicit: “I like bananas better”]
Looking for an explanation, yes? It’s a linguistic convention, totally. I mean, you know, we add a lot of unnecessary words, like, serious. It’s superfluous verbage. Look, I know it seems to be a recent thing, but it’s, like, been going on for a long time, right?
The cheek in this comment, tho
linguistic convention, innit?
I think this has been my favorite answer in any of these threads. So concise and tongue in cheek, I love it.
trump speech writer
You sure about that?
superfluous
What’s wrong with it tho?
Using “though” has a long history.
Tho is just for brevity, like drive-thru instead of drive-through.
Narrator : Unaware of what year it was, Joe wandered the streets desperate for help. But the English language had deteriorated into a hybrid of hillbilly, valleygirl, inner-city slang and various grunts. Joe was able to understand them, but when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.
Upgradde, with two D’s for a double-dose of pimpin’.
I get this is likely a reference to something, but casually using slurs and linguistic elitism are both pretty lame.
haters gonna hate
I’m going to guess that it’s Idiocracy, in which case, those words are used because society had devolved into mindless rednecks. And EVERYBODY knows mindless rednecks LOVE those words.
To me it just looks like an opportunity to virtue signal by throwing someone else under the bus in terms of their reputation. It doesn’t allow the other to save face.
Also, the decision to categorize those things as slurs, which is the same category that contains the n-word, seems like an escalation of severity. The escalation of severity seems to only serve the purpose of taking the other person down a peg, and not of improving the state of discourse here.
I get that many people see it as a matter of: see bad behavior, call it out, improve the world. But there’s a cost to that kind of thing, just like there’s a cost in cutting down trees to improve an ecosystem. So to invoke that process, and cause that cost to be paid by the group, for a problem of insufficient size, to me seems counterproductive and more aligned with role playing heroism than actually enacting it.
You’ll get used to it tho. Sike!! Not!!!
It’s a while that’s happening tho
Language changes over time tho
It do be like that tho
I just want people to stop using “to” when they mean “too”, maybe it’s my adhd brain, but that is not something I can just read through. It pretty much always throws me off and I have to reread the sentence.
I’ll be your huckleberry tho.
a simple exclamation point or bold letters could do
I’ll be your huckleberry.
But Wyatt I got the AIDs tho.
You’re a daisy if you do tho fam. It’d be real lit.
Say when tho.
Some influencer probably started using it… And now everyone is like “language evolves ok?”. :)
Language evolves ok tho?
I like it tho
