I fear for the imminent extinction of a simple and useful English word. The word "yes" is on the endangered list.
You will notice this first in restaurants, and then you will start to hear it everywhere. You ask an eager, pleasant and professional server, "May I have a ginger ale?," and she replies with an enthusiasm that borders on the hysterical, "Absolutely!" Servers seem to be being trained these days to express a kind of surprise at the simplest requests. And they are being trained never to answer with a simple "Yes sir."
They also say "of course you may!" or "not a problem!" or "by all means!" I suppose it's part of an effort to seem more personable. But it confuses the old-fashioned diner who thinks that his order was actually not a request for a favour but a simple instruction.
If you are at all like me, which is perhaps oversensitive to language and constitutionally grumpy, you will react with a modicum of surprise, even with that faint nauseous taste of rising ego. "Absolutely" conveys, "Actually, believe it or not, I am pleased to inform you that it is indeed possible to find a ginger ale for you!"; it turns a simple order into a social interaction, a favour, that itself in turn demands cloying thanks.
I know this sensitivity of mine may seem a little crazy to normal people, but I am sure I am not alone in craving less emotional interaction with the preparers of food, so let me explain it further.
When a server uses one of these energetic confirmations - "of course you may!" - it sounds a little like a reprimand, as if it is her job to remind you that of course ginger ale is available (you old silly!). I don't think it's asking too much of modern restaurant managers to teach their staff to respond to requests with a humble "yes sir," or even with the slightly colder but even more efficient repetition of the order, "one ginger ale."
I know it sounds very elitist for me to suggest that there are some of us left who still feel uncomfortable about entering into such effusive exchanges with waiters. But I just think it saves everybody a lot of time to avoid these exhausting chains of assurances and counter-thanks. I'm scared to even say "thank you" now when a server places a dish in front of me - I'm scared he's going to assure me that it was "not a problem" to bring it. The response will just perplex me. Why would it be a problem? Or he may even say "absolutely," as if to clear up any misgivings about the incompleteness of the dish.
I shouldn't really be concerned about the changing meaning of absolutely. Exchanges such as "thank you" and "you're welcome" are pretty meaningless anyway; they embody what the great linguist Roman Jakobson called the phatic function of language, that is the language we use merely to establish contact with an interlocutor. The phatic function is that part of language that establishes the channel of communication. "How are you?/Fine, thanks" is an exchange that plays a similar role. The specific words that we use in that formula are interchangeable: we may say "How's it?/Not bad" or "Whassup?/Not much" and the message is exactly the same. So "thank you/you're welcome" can easily be replaced by "excellent/absolutely" (as we hear in trendy restaurants) without any loss of meaning.
Furthermore, the elimination of "yes" is hardly restricted to restaurants. Listen to people being interviewed on the radio, and you will hear that they have all read the same instruction manual on how to answer factual yes/no questions: Absolutely seems to be the affirmative of the moment. "Did you return to Canada in 2008?" an interviewer will ask. "Absolutely," replies the guest, putting to rest all doubt that he may have returned partially or half-heartedly or inexactly. It's strange that popular taste chooses a four-syllable word to replace a one-syllable word but then that perhaps reflects the spirit of the time - the same spirit that's reflected in corporate discussions of "granularity" for detail and "off-lining" for talk.