No bad
- Thread starter Monica238
- Start date
No, but you could say 'It is no bad thing . . . '
Where? I’ve never heard it!
I'm sure I've heard it at work and probably also in some TV shows.
But you know how it is with trend words and trendy phrases, they come and go. It's not a phrase I use on a daily basis. When the situation is right it fits just fine as an exclamation, though.
But you know how it is with trend words and trendy phrases, they come and go. It's not a phrase I use on a daily basis. When the situation is right it fits just fine as an exclamation, though.
I've never heard it either.
Surely Scottish would be "nae bad"!
Apart from when spoken by natives of Scotland, nobody has heard "No bad" from a native English speaker.
"No" is pronounced with a diphthong in English English /nəʊ/,whereas "not" has a single vowel sound. "No bad" would sound as /nəʊ bæd/
What you may have heard from an English person is "t" pronounced as a glottal stop. With a glottal stop you would hear /nɒɁ bæd/
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For those who don't read IPA
There is a big difference in pronunciation between "No bad" (Which sounds like "Know bad") and "No'bad" (which sounds like "Nobb add")
Apart from when spoken by natives of Scotland, nobody has heard "No bad" from a native English speaker.
"No" is pronounced with a diphthong in English English /nəʊ/,whereas "not" has a single vowel sound. "No bad" would sound as /nəʊ bæd/
What you may have heard from an English person is "t" pronounced as a glottal stop. With a glottal stop you would hear /nɒɁ bæd/
____________________________________________________
For those who don't read IPA
There is a big difference in pronunciation between "No bad" (Which sounds like "Know bad") and "No'bad" (which sounds like "Nobb add")
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I haven't heard it, but I don't totally discount the possibility that it could exist. From "my bad" to "no bad" isn't such a stretch.
I thought of that possibility too. However, stretch or not, I haven't heard "No bad" in that sense, only "My bad". !No worries! is quite common!
I googled the phrase and I found few useful results. There was one paper about Dundonian expressions, the local version spoken in and around Dundee, but I'm sure I didn't hear it there. I've never been to any place north of Edinburgh.
I've definitely heard it more often than just once or twice or else I wouldn't have remembered it. In my mind it's saved as casual speech and within context it was always clear that it was a variation of the exclamation "not bad!"
But as hard as I try, I cannot put my finger on it when and where I heard and used it.
I'm usually working closely with engineering teams from my customers and they usually are a younger crowd in their twenties and engineers do tend to use casual speech once you get to know them. It may just have been a "cool phrase" that was used for a while, but within context the meaning was perfectly clear.
I've definitely heard it more often than just once or twice or else I wouldn't have remembered it. In my mind it's saved as casual speech and within context it was always clear that it was a variation of the exclamation "not bad!"
But as hard as I try, I cannot put my finger on it when and where I heard and used it.
I'm usually working closely with engineering teams from my customers and they usually are a younger crowd in their twenties and engineers do tend to use casual speech once you get to know them. It may just have been a "cool phrase" that was used for a while, but within context the meaning was perfectly clear.
Where were they from, and when was this, if you don't mind my asking?
That was some time from the late nineties roughly until the virus hit in 2020. If I exclude those countries that show a big variance in the level of English like India, Singapore and the Philippines, that leaves only Canada, the US, the UK and Australia as native English countries. Even though I have not been to every single region in those countries, I cannot exclude a specific region because we had local service engineers from all over the place and I've met most of them at least once a year, and then I also supported them on the phone quite often.
So that's not much help for pinpointing the source I fear. Sorry!
No South Africa?
Unfortunately, no. I would have loved to go there.No South Africa?
But while backpacking I met South Africans once in a while and here and there. Their English was fairly normal in my mind. So no special slang or obvious Afrikaans influences as far as I could tell.