When I was younger, I was introduced to the concept of speech. I lived for a few years in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and had the dialect of that place imposed upon me. To my Bostonian relatives it was at once both hilarious how I called soda “pop” and egregious to my Bostonian heritage to call a really short hair cut a “buzz cut.”  So upon moving back to Boston (well I actually moved back to Massachusetts but people refer to Massachusetts as Boston) my reeducation began. I learned what a water bubbler is (for all of those who this makes no sense to, a water bubbler is a water fountain), the necessities and uses of “wicked” (uses that work: wicked awesome, wicked fun, wicked hot; uses that don’t work: wicked what?, wicked wicked), and how to effectively kill off the “r” sound (don’t go to the ba, if you have ya ca).

When I entered elementary school, I learned about the idea of changing language. In second grade, it was cool to say “no duh” in response to your buddy stating the obvious. Its cold out today he would say, and you’d reply “no duh.” But then third grade rolled around, and “no duh” was no longer cool, hip, rad. The few times I did reply “no duh” the whole class would turn their heads and giggle. It was terrible. Also, I learned about the excesses of language. I started out calling things cool. That dog was cool, that bike was cool, that game was cool. But then it went from being just cool, to really cool, and from really cool, to ultimately cool. The elevation of language from being simple to ultimate happened over weeks and suddenly everything became excessive. Today was a ridiculously hot day, that show was supremely ridiculous. The world was awesomely cool. But as life set in, the awesome ridiculousness of the ultimate lost its appeal and my experiments with language head in different directions. 

I started using sarcasm in the fifth grade. You would say the complete opposite to the obvious, and it was considered typically funny. Yeah that hat is really cool! Well…my sarcasm improved over the years, and slowly I shaved away the excesses of wet sarcasm for a more tonal dry sarcasm. It was trickier and more fun because a large percent of people could never pick up on it, and it would leave them confused as to why I just said that I liked eating little children for breakfast. Language became a tool for me, a tool to jab and criticize the world, all the while saying the opposite from what I meant. Only the wise could break through the barrier, and so language was protection for me as well.

When I entered college, I entered another language experiment, this one in the differences of language. I was from an area that breathed English, rarely deviating from this pump and flow of words. College though was Spanish breath and German cough and Chinese sneeze. The whole campus was a variation of respiratory constructs and I could barely understand what to do. In my opening to the lungs of communication, I accessed words beyond the ultimate, the dry, the popular and local. I gained accessed to language on a whole new level, an experiment that I will keep on exploring likely till I die.

Words are tied to humans from our youth to our weak old age, and we construct our reality by words and language. So, take note of the how you use your language; it’s important.