To be honest, people are saying "honestly" all the time.
According to the Corpus of Historical American English, a database that measures word usage over time, the use of "honestly" has skyrocketed over the last 25 years.
Not just in casual conversation: It's a signifier of online authenticity.
"Honestly" is the name of the podcast by CBS News' new editor Bari Weiss, the title of a 2022 studio album by Drake, the name of a new AI journaling app and appended to a number of popular TikTok and Instagram accounts.
So, for this installment of Word of the Week, we ask, what's up with 'honestly'?
The honest tie to internet culture
"I got so excited when I saw that chart," says Amanda Brennan, a meme expert known as the Internet Librarian, about the graph showing "honestly's" popularity.
Brennan says it makes sense that a rise in the word coincides with the rise, since 2000, of internet culture. The more information — and disinformation — that flies through the World Wide Web, the greater people feel the need to express authenticity.
"Phrases like 'not going to lie', 'to be honest,' 'if I'm being honest,' 'let's be honest' — all of these figurative phrases have become part of our speech," Brennan says. "And I think that's in parallel with everything that is happening in the world, [the] conversation about credibility."
Is it just a crutch? How "honestly" has evolved over time
The word "honest" comes from the Latin honestus, meaning honorable.
In the mid-twentieth century, use of "frankly" outranked "honestly," but the words were not synonymous at the time, Miller says. "Frankly" meant something harsher, more factual than emotional. (Maybe that's why it landed so hard when Rhett Butler used it in his parting words to Scarlett O'Hara. Imagine: "Honestly, my dear, I don't give a damn.")
But over time, "honestly" became more ubiquitous. Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, "honestly" had a narrow and morally charged meaning, says Christian Miller, a former director of the Honesty Project at Wake Forest and Carnegie Mellon Universities. As in, "Officer, I'm being honest with you. I didn't rob the store."
"When people would talk that way, it was understood that they were talking about things like moral truthfulness," said Miller, who teaches philosophy at Wake Forest.
That meaning lives on, he says, but its usage has expanded over time to include several subtle changes.
It can soften a harsh critique — "Honestly, I didn't like that last piece of yours," he explains. It also serves as a signal that a speaker is about to open up an emotional vulnerability: "I don't think we should be friends anymore. …"
"By adding the 'honestly' to it, it's adding an emotional charge or tinge to the conversation, where you're conveying [not only how you] cognitively think, but how you feel, too," he says.
Pull the linguistic thread a little further, and the word pops up as a mark of frustration.
As in, "Honestly, I've had enough of this."
Brennan adds another twist on "honestly," particularly when used in conversation among young people. If you're uncertain of your personal truth, "honestly" gives you a second to figure it out on the fly.
"If you're speaking, you can just use honestly or literally as a crutch word to give yourself a little more thinking time when you really want to be outrightly honest," she says.
Are people actually being honest?
To be honest (sorry — TBH), the word has been deployed by people with a history of less-than-honorable behavior.
But Brennan points to the "Big Brother eyes" theory as one reason people feel they need to underline their honesty. In 2006, researchers at Newcastle University found, in a study that became famous, that people were more likely to put money in an honesty box to pay for their coffee or tea when photographs of eyes were posted above the box.
The internet, Brennan says, is an infinite monolith of eyes.
"Social media is all of these sets of eyes on you," she says. "There's more scrutiny on you. There's more people who are afraid of cancel culture. The everyday person is put into this universe where they are just so much more scrutinized."
It may feel, in a world where AI is booming and deepfakes and disinformation are everywhere, that honesty is getting shredded. Miller, who authored The Honesty Crisis, argues that a few bad actors skew the average: Most people don't lie most of the time.
"People might think lying is pretty common, and early research suggests that," Miller says. "But more recent research found that lying is actually less common than you might think and that the majority of people rarely lie."
Brennan admits she has an "honestly" habit, but it's not just a filler word for her.
"I'm also a very big heart-on-my-sleeve speaker, and I want to convey all the things I'm feeling to someone," she says. "I do use honestly earnestly in my life and I hope that vibe comes across."
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