Overheard on the train
Thursday 13 August 2009
Sitting on the train from San Diego back to Los Angeles—leaves 8.20 p.m., arrives 11.20 p.m.—I overheard a girl in the seat behind me on the phone. I reckoned that she was about my age:
No, I’m on my way to L.A. I’ll be back in Santa Cruz on Monday: I have to go back to work. Well, I’m going to be picked up by Jenna, Jonno, and Kelsey. We’re going to meet up with Jasmine in L.A. then we’re going to drive to New Mexico tonight. Well, I guess Jenna’s car doesn’t have air-conditioning, 1 and we don’t want to drive across the desert during the day without air conditioning. Well, y’know, we have to cross Arizona. The journey will be about twelve hours, and we’re leaving at 11, maybe 12, so we’re going to have to travel during some daylight. Shut uuuup! It’s going to be soooo miserable… I agreed to do it, then Jenna just dropped this bomb on me. [Later] It’s gonna be fine. I just have to keep telling myself that. [And so on, for about ten minutes, with frequent repetition of the ‘It’s gonna be fine’ riff.]
It sounded to me like a recipe for disaster. I myself was exhausted on the train, and couldn’t possibly contemplate getting to L.A. and starting a nice, safe drive to New Mexico that night. When I arrived in Tucson last week at 10.30 p.m., it was still 90ºF. Central Arizona—including Phoenix—is even hotter. I hope Jenna, Jonno, Kelsey, and un-named train girl arrived safe and sound, and that they are still talking to one another.
Notes
- This is a really confusing usage which both fascinates and frustrates me. I can’t work out if it’s specifically Californian (or even specifically valley-girl slang), or else in widespread usage across the U.S.A. In this context, ‘I guess’ doesn’t mean ‘I guess that’ or ‘I suppose that’, but rather it means ‘I know that’, or more specifically, ‘I have recently learnt that it is definitely the case that…’. ↩
Helen
6 September 2009, 10.53 am #
Hi R
Reading your report of the girl on the train, I reckon that the ‘I guess’ in this context doesn’t QUITE mean ‘I know that’, but rather ‘I suppose it’s probably because’....which is not TOTALLY distinct from ‘I guess’. Would that match with any other usages of ‘I guess’ that you heard in the vicinity?
xxx
H
Richard Flynn
7 September 2009, 6.26 am #
Well, I’m not quite sure that she did mean ‘I suppose it’s probably because…’, since she later referred to how ‘then Jenna dropped this bomb [i.e. that her car has no air-conditioning] on me’. In other words, she seems to have known for certain—inasmuch as Jenna told her—that the lack of a/c was their reason for speeding on through the night.
I haven’t since then heard anyone in the flesh use the phrase ‘I guess [that]…’, but the tech podcaster Leo Laporte seems to use it more or less in the sense ‘I know this to be the case that’. I’ll keep my ears open.