Whatever and ever, amen

So Madonna is catching some flak for skirting Malawi adoption rules to express-shop for her latest baby?

Whatever.

So some Republican congressman in Florida was nabbed sending sexually graphic e-mails to a young male page?

Whatever.

So Google just paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube.com, that shrine to amateur video documentation?

Whatever.

So billboards are being unfurled once again in Metro Manila, a week or so after the public outrage over their destructiveness had been whipped up into a Milenyo-like froth?

Whatever.

"Whatever" may not be the defining word of the 21st century, but it’s definitely in the running. People are addicted to its blithe, shoulder-shrugging power; whatever life hands you, just say "whatever."

Listening to this word seep into our culture and language over the past few years, I became curious about its birth. I wanted references. I wanted citations. Not as easy a task to accomplish as you might think.

Of course, "whatever" derives from longer expressions of acceptance: things like "whatever you like," "whatever floats your boat," "whatever turns you on" (clearly, a ’60s citation). But its abrupt clipping, its modern shortening, is not so easy to trace.

William Safire may have teams of researchers tracking down his etymologies; all I have is the Internet, and the Internet can be a vast, teeming world of "whatever." There’s nothing to grasp hold of when it comes to this expression; no way to find any purchase.

I tried Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, for a little more solid grounding. Hmm… "adv (1870) : in any case; whatever the case may be; sometimes used interjectionally to suggest the unimportance of a decision between two alternatives."

It’s that "interjectionally" that interested me. This suggests people were using the term – standing alone – as early as the 19th century.

After all, it couldn’t really have been just in this century – the 21st century – that people started using the expression "whatever." Surely, John Hughes was there first in the ’80s with his seminal high school flicks. Certainly, Keanu Reeves had a hand in popularizing this all-purpose slackerism. Doug Coupland’s character must have muttered "whatever" hundreds of times in his books. I’m just too, well, unmotivated to do any proper research. Let the grinds write the definitive thesis papers on the subject. Whatever.

For those who eschew words, and for whom even shrugging is too much effort, some people simply choose to place their middle three fingers in the air, approximating a big fat "W." Some prefer to position each of their thumbs and index fingers into separate "V" signs, then join the two wings together to make a "W." Whatever.

I should point out that Minnesota punk band Husker Du was there as early as 1984 with the song Whatever from their double album "Zen Arcade." Oasis had a similarly titled song in 1994, while Ben Folds Five called their 1995 album "Whatever and Ever Amen." (There’s even a hand drawing on the cover of two winged hands joined together in a "W" sign.)

Then there’s Liam Lynch, the bespectacled indie film director and sometime songwriter whose tune United States of Whatever featured a two-chord punk rant, punctuated by quick bursts of "Yeah, whatever…" as he stormed into the guitar riff. The song was hot on MTV for a couple of minutes in 2002, and Lynch now has some entertaining Podcast stuff on iTunes, as well as a Tenacious D feature set for release. Whatever.

"Whatever" seems quite modern. A sign of our deflationary times. Depending on how the expression is delivered, it implies a deep reservoir of exasperation, boredom or indifference that somehow cannot be expressed in words. Hence, the lackadaisical brevity of "whatever."

I must admit I’m one of those people who find the expression a bit annoying. Its lack of effort pins it conveniently with a "slacker" label, and I’d be hard pressed to think of a slacker who hasn’t muttered the word on occasion. The fact that "whatever" has been divorced from more expansive exegesis –that people can’t be bothered to go into details anymore – strikes me as yet more evidence of this generation’s retreat from the real world and its endless decisions into a kind of technological cocoon – a matrix, if you will – that resists choice. Whatever.

But, as Canadian prog-rock band Rush has pointed out to us, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." At the heart of "whatever" is a kind of surrender, an acquiescence to the same kind of moral relativity that allows Nazis to stomp down main street or martial law to pass for normal, everyday life.

The upside of "whatever" (yes, there is one) has to do with its sunny, easygoing nature. To say "whatever" implies you are okay with either alternative. In this, the expression shares a bit of blunted, hip-hop history with "It’s all good" – that shrugging, bahala-na idiom so cherished by people who can’t be bothered to get up off the sofa.

Perhaps, though, we don’t need to go back to ancient times to pinpoint "whatever"’s origins. Maybe we need only go back to the 1950s – specifically, to a certain signature tune by a blonde-haired, blue-eyed singer named Doris Day. Surely, there was not much angst troubling this gal’s freckle-faced world? Why else would she immortalize a bit of Italian pop bahala-na called Que Sera Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)? Well, maybe all that pop sheen was wisdom in disguise – a little touch of Ecclesiastes for the pop charts. Maybe Doris had mastered the "Serenity Prayer" and was not about to muss her hair over things she could not change in this world. Maybe she was a Zen master in a gingham skirt.

Or maybe she just didn’t have a brain in her bottle-blonde head.

Whatever.