What does maybe mean? Does it mean yes or no?

Have you ever tried to explain what maybe means. Its really hard to be specific when defining a word that means maybe yes or maybe no. And the more you think about it the more difficult it becomes. Go on give it a go now, try and explain what it means?!? Well the official definition is:

maybe
/ˈmeɪbiː/
adverb
perhaps; possibly.
“maybe I won’t go back

How can you explain maybe by using perhaps and possibly. You would then have to explain perhaps and possibly. So when my son asked me:

“What does maybe mean? Does it mean yes? Or does it mean No?”

I knew I was going to have difficulty explaining it. My son does not like ambiguity in any aspect of his life. He always needs a definite plan, he always needed to know a very specific answer to any question he asked. Not good when as a parent our go to is “we’ll see” or “maybe”.  How many times as a parent have you said “we’ll see” because you didn’t want to disappoint your child and say an outright no so you say “we’ll see” with a view to never doing it ever. Its just a way of putting off your children. Well there is no putting my son off with ambiguous non committal language. He’s 5 now and although he didn’t speak until he was turned 2 (he didn’t even say Mama or Dada) his vocabulary now is something else. His use of the English language is amazing as long as it’s definite, specific and not ambiguous at all. What he struggles with is the words and phrases that don’t mean what they actually say or that are not specific.

I’ve noticed this need for specifics with names. My husband is called Andrew and my son is forever asking….

“Why do people call him Andy?”

Any names that are shortened he can’t quite understand why we do that. David to Dave, James to Jim, Steven to Ste. He can’t cope with it. And when we told him that our friend Syd was actually called Christopher it blew his mind (well mine too actually when I found out)!!!

And that is why I think he likes numbers. Numbers are predictable, they mean what they say. 1 means 1. 9 means 9. They can’t be shortened, they can’t change. And I believe that is why he likes numbers so much. If he can, he describes everything in numbers. He describes football players by squad number rather than name, he describes his friends at school by the number of teeth they have lost…”Ethan who has lost one tooth”, he describes people by their ages…”Grandad who is 70 years old”.

But certain words….those are different. It’s not only nicknames that he struggles with. One of the worst things he struggles with is imterjections….in particular mhmm…..

I never even realised how often I used mhmm until he picked me up on it and asked me to stop saying it because he didn’t know what it meant. I explained it meant yes and tried not to do it. Unfortunately it was the classic try not to do something but find yourself doing it all the more.

And I found myself answering mhmm to him quite a lot until one day he screamed…..

“Stop doing that I don’t know what that means!”

And so we have a mhmm ban in our house. None of us are allowed to say it. Just as I thought we had come to a happy place with communication he asked…

“What does maybe mean? Does it mean yes? Or does it mean no?”

I must have said maybe to him without even realizing it and he did not like it. Once again I was stuck for an answer to one of his questions. How to describe maybe?!? The reality is maybe means yes and no, but at the same time it means neither yes or no. I said it means “maybe yes or maybe no”. Worst answer ever to give an indecisive child. To him it’s either yes or no. There is no in-between. How can there be. Surely you know whether the answer is yes or no, don’t you?!? And this fits in with how he answers a yes/no question. The majority of yes/no questions I ask him he wil answer with a chant of “yes, no, yes, no, yes, no” . I am very much used to this but at a party we went to recently another parent asked him if he wanted a drink and he said “yes, no, yes, no” and the parent was like “well which one is it?!?!” He clearly can’t decide but instead of just saying that, or being non committal and saying maybe he feels he has to answer yes or no. He hasn’t learnt to be non specific, I don’t think he can. And I am finding it hard to learn to be definite and specific to him.

Well I guess onwards we go and maybe we will see whether I can possibly do it or not…..