YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE

This is an interesting and irritatingly overused statement beloved of the young. I’ve seen it on t-shirts and heard it bellowed like a war cry from one teenager to another, or in defence of an act of apparent recklessness.

Grammar comes first, and the sentence structure is jumping up and down for attention like a small child, or an icon needing an update at the bottom of an Apple Mac screen.

You Only Live Once.
Second person Premodifying Non-finite Postmodifying
Pronoun adverbial verb adverbial

The word order is the interesting thing here, because it is irregular. The direct vocative second person address engages the reader immediately, and is clearly linked to the non finite verb. However, the pattern of two adverbials, one premodifying and one postmodifying, is highly irregular to the extent of making the sentence ambiguous. The more standard phraseology for the most commonly held interpretation of the saying would be YOU LIVE ONLY ONCE, implying that each person has one chance at life and should make the most of it. Perhaps those who are so fond of the phrase order the words thus so that they can bellow it to one another in acronym form: YOLO. The more standard word order would lead to the vocally inconvenient YLOO… entertaining to imagine, awkward to pronouce.

But thinking about it: perhaps the saying has another emphasis. You only LIVE once: the pre/post-modification pattern puts the emphasis on the verb, implying that you can do many things more than once but living isn’t one of them. In turn this belies how people pronounce the phrase, as those speaking it place the emphasis on the two adverbials. This suggests that these are the more important sentence elements, placing the pronoun and verb unit in the semantic shade. Again, taking those two words together would produce the meaning ‘only once’, further cementing the meaning shouted from person to person. However, the combination of word order and intonation pattern changes the semantics of the word ONLY, meaning something closer to ‘in lesser form’, rather than ‘merely’. Something similar to how someone might respond if they ate a piece of cake while on a diet: ‘oh, it’s only small piece.’ The shift in word order (acronym convenience aside) appears to make a colloquial reduction of the value of the verb ‘to live’ and therefore of the act of living – as if, as it’s just something temporary, it is not the ‘be all and the end all’ that we think it is.

‘The be all and the end all’ indeed: the phrase from Macbeth is perhaps the more traditional exploration of the way the phrase is used. The dreaded, fashionable cry of ‘YOLO’ seems, belying Buddhist credo as it goes, to be used to herald and excuse the acts of reckless youth. Looking at its language more precisely, though, perhaps it’s a devaluation or questioning of life itself. If life isn’t particularly valuable, if living is to be premodified with ‘only’, then perhaps it’s something which isn’t worth safeguarding.

Whether those who use the phrase are devaluing life this way through belief in something greater is questionable: if ‘you only live once’, perhaps by definition you can’t ‘live on’ in an ‘afterlife’ of ‘life after death’. Whether they’re questioning whether life itself is real or just illusory is an interesting issue too, as the premodifying ‘only’ could be a verbal hedging of one’s philosophical doubts about whether we are really here at all…

Either way. I don’t like the acronym, I don’t like the battle cry, I don’t like the hipsterish tendency to latch on to a phrase that sounds good but doesn’t mean very much. But I do really, really like analysing language. And you can do that just as often as you want.