Back when I was in college, there was a simple drinking game. It was called “Hi, Bob.” The game could only be played whenever there was a rerun of The Bob Newhart Show on, which meant just about any afternoon. There were, I understand, many variations. But the most basic was this: Whenever a character said “Hi, Bob” to Newhart, everybody drank.
There’s no barrier to playing the Newhart show game in the age of streaming. Playing “Hi, Bob” while working through a complete season in one sitting gives new meaning to binge-watching.
But it is a bit dated. Let me propose a new drinking game, one in sync with the way we speak today. It’s called “Right, Audie?”
Here’s how it’s played.
First, tune in to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. (One could also play the game listening to Morning Edition, but that’s just a tad bit early for serious drinking.) All Things Considered is preferable not only because it airs at the cocktail hour but also because the host is Audie Cornish, who can be counted on to provide an abundance of opportunities to imbibe.
Cornish may be the most prominent person afflicted with a peculiarly modern verbal tic: the interjection of the compact question “right?” after any (it can seem like every) statement. Pour yourself the beverage of your choice and get ready. Every time Cornish tosses in an extraneous “right?” we’ll all take a sip. Just be sure not to overdo it. Keep the sips small, and hand off your keys to a designated driver.
“Can we talk about the term profiteer?” Cornish asked a guest recently in a conversation about tech gorillionaires. “And why do you think it applies here in the pandemic, where people didn’t go out seeking to take advantage of the rest of us, right?”
Everybody, drink!
Cornish did an interview about women who won the right — put your glass down, that’s a correct use of “right” — to vote. She asked her guest about the tendency to reduce the struggle to heroes and villains: “So much of the suffrage movement is, I guess, valorized, right?”
Now you can drink!
On NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour panel discussing the Netflix show Malcolm & Marie, Cornish praised the actors John David Washington and Zendaya. “And you have two incredibly, incredibly talented performers,” she said of the leads. “In the past, this kind of role might have gone to Brad and Angelina, right?”
Cheers!
A little later in the same conversation, she complained about authors who resort to ventriloquism: “The worst-case scenario for a writer-director — right? — [is] for your people not to feel lived in but for them to feel like puppets for your own ideas.”
Need a refill?
Later still, Cornish wondered what the future had in store for Zendaya, given that she’s hitched her “wagon to someone like [writer-director] Sam Levinson, right?”
Hi, Bob!
According to the Macmillan dictionary, interjecting “right?“ is “an informal way for checking that someone is paying attention and understands what you are saying.” Perhaps. But it is also a way to give your audience a little verbal shove, right? A way to extract their agreement without actually asking what they think.
I hope you didn’t miss the opportunity, just then, to tilt your glass when I interjected “right?” (Nobody said that Cornish was the only offender, just one of the worst.)
I suspect we will look back at “right?” thirty years from now much the way we look back at the habit, so prominent in the ’80s, of saying “like” this and “like” that. Unaccented as it was, “like” fit perfectly with the Valley Girl drone that could be heard coast to coast, far from its California birthplace. In a similar way, “right?” is the perfect empty verbiage of our age. It’s common to hear teenagers turn every statement into a question by “uptalking,” or applying a “rising inflection” on the ends of sentences. “Right?” is a distillation of that tone, right?
You can put the glass down now. Bye, Bob.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
