I've heard it said that life is a carnival, (see Cahoots, The Band, 1971), but I don't buy it. Unless you're an Aussie - and in that case it's completely understandable considering your criminal provenance - implicit in the phrase "no worries" is a bold face lie.
I'll go a step further.
Consider the folks you hear who thoughtlessly repeat this imported cliché and you will notice an underlying commonality. These careless linguistic pickpockets are the very people so encased in their own private world of trivial woe that to say "no worries" comes off as a futile hope or as a sad desperate godless prayer.
In contrast to the homegrown East Coast expression "don't worry about it," "no worries" with its grammatical indolence and deliberate evasion of specificity is essentially a rebuke to the harsh realities of human existence.
I can already hear you Californians out there with your cheery chorus of "what's so bad about that?" Well I'll tell you what's wrong with it - To paraphrase George Orwell, sloppy language inevitably leads to sloppy thinking.
And so it is with the no worriers. These are the same people who begin every sentence with the word so, who punctuate every mindless utterance with regular intervals of "you know" and who use the word like for every purpose save for its proper one.
We live in The Age of Mild which I suppose is preferable to an age of instability and chaos. Our tongues, with their absence of gravitas, have yielded to a pleasant, noncommittal indecision where honesty is a punishable offense.
But hey, no worries, who cares anyway!
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