Karly

There’s a particular kind of cruelty that lives in the word “soon,” and it isn’t loud or dramatic or even immediately recognisable as cruelty, which is precisely why it works so well.

On the surface, “soon” feels generous. It suggests intention, movement, a future that’s already leaning toward you. It sounds like a promise without quite having to become one, which is where the problem begins, because linguistically, “soon” isn’t a promise at all. It’s a deictic expression, a word whose meaning depends entirely on context, and when that context is withheld, stretched, or quietly manipulated, what you’re left with isn’t time but suspension.

To say “I’ll let you know soon” isn’t to give information. It’s to delay it, gently, politely, and often indefinitely.

What fascinates me, and if I’m honest, what has personally tormented me, is how socially acceptable this kind of vagueness is. In pragmatics, we talk about how meaning isn’t just encoded in words but inferred through shared assumptions, expectations, and cooperative principles. When someone says “soon,” we don’t process it as an empty placeholder. We fill it in. We imagine a timeline that feels reasonable to us, something proximal, something that respects our emotional investment, and in doing so, we participate in our own misinterpretation.

Because “soon” can mean anything from later today to never, and both uses remain technically correct.

There’s something almost elegant about the deniability it affords. If you follow up, if you ask for clarification, you risk appearing impatient, demanding, perhaps even unreasonable, because after all, they did say “soon.” They didn’t ignore you. They didn’t refuse. They simply placed you in a temporal holding pattern where expectation continues to exist without resolution.

And so you wait, not because you were instructed to, but because you were linguistically guided into it.

This is where “soon” begins to resemble other softeners in language, those polite fictions we use to maintain social harmony while avoiding commitment. “We should do this again sometime.” “I’ll get back to you.” “Let’s see how things go.” Each of these utterances performs a kind of emotional labour, cushioning the interaction while quietly removing any obligation to follow through.

“Soon” belongs to this family, but it’s perhaps the most insidious member because it borrows the structure of time itself. It sounds measurable. It sounds like something you could, in theory, hold someone accountable to, and yet the moment you try, it dissolves.

Growing up in Mexico, I realised quite early on that English doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of vagueness. We have our own version, one that operates a little differently and, if anything, feels even more disorienting: “ahorita.”

At first glance, “ahorita” looks like it should be more precise. It comes from “ahora,” meaning “now,” softened into a diminutive that suggests immediacy, something small, something close, something about to happen. You’d expect it to anchor time, to bring things nearer.

It does the opposite.

Because unlike “soon,” which is intentionally cryptic, a strategic vagueness that allows the speaker to withhold commitment while maintaining the appearance of one, “ahorita” isn’t just vague. It’s fundamentally unplaceable.

It can mean now. It can mean later. It can mean in a few minutes, or in a few days, or not at all, and the unsettling part is that this isn’t a misuse of the word. This is the word functioning exactly as it’s supposed to.

With “soon,” you at least feel that, in theory, there is a timeline being implied, even if it’s stretched beyond recognition. There is a sense that meaning exists somewhere, slightly out of reach, deliberately obscured.

With “ahorita,” there is no timeline to recover.

Even context doesn’t fully save you. You can read tone, you can rely on past behaviour, you can try to infer intention, but ultimately, “ahorita” resists being fixed. Sometimes it happens quickly. Sometimes not at all. Sometimes it arrives when you’ve already stopped expecting it. It is, in the most literal sense, a surprise.

When someone tells you “ahorita voy,” you aren’t just waiting. You’re existing in a state where waiting itself has no measurable shape.

And that’s where the cruelty lies, not in delay, but in unpredictability.

Because at least with “soon,” you can still pretend you know what you’re waiting for.

What interests me isn’t simply that these words are vague, but that we rely on them so heavily in situations where clarity would, in theory, be more efficient. There’s a reason for that. Precision can be socially expensive. To give a specific time, to commit to a concrete outcome, is to make yourself accountable in a way that vagueness allows you to avoid. “Soon” protects the speaker. It keeps options open. It softens the risk of disappointing someone directly by delaying the moment at which that disappointment might need to be acknowledged.

But that protection isn’t neutral. It transfers the emotional burden onto the person who is waiting.

Because waiting, in this context, isn’t passive. It’s active, interpretive, and often exhausting. You check your phone. You reread messages. You wonder if you misunderstood, if your expectations were too high, if you’re being unreasonable for wanting something more precise. The ambiguity doesn’t just obscure time. It destabilises your sense of what is fair to expect from others.

And yet, we continue to use these words. I continue to use these words. There’s something almost inevitable about it, as though language itself resists total clarity because human interaction does. We hedge, we soften, we leave doors slightly open, not always out of malice, but out of habit, politeness, fear of confrontation, or simply because we don’t yet know what we want to commit to.

So perhaps the issue isn’t that “soon” lies, but that it allows us to avoid telling the truth in a more precise way.

“Ahorita,” on the other hand, doesn’t even pretend to be precise.

One gives you the illusion of a timeline. The other removes the timeline altogether.

And if you’ve ever found yourself waiting, whether on a “soon” that stretched far beyond what felt reasonable or on an “ahorita” that could arrive at any moment or not at all, you’ll know that the harm isn’t in the word itself, but in the space it creates, that quiet, indefinite space where time passes, expectation lingers, and nothing quite happens, at least not yet, at least not in a way that can be named.