georginasand | Dialects

"When I speak Polish now, it is infiltrated, permeated, and inflected with English in my head. Each language modifies the other, crossbreeds with it, fertilizes it. Each language makes the other relative. Like everybody, I am the sum of my languages." ~Eva Hoffman

Although explaining that I was going to school in Minnesota (where, yes, it is cold. You know no one have ever told me that.) involved a lot of jokes including the words "Yeah, sure, you betcha" I had no idea that in some ways I really would have to learn new language.

And one that isn't particularly regional.

I came from a place where “onward into glory” is a directive not limited to battlefields and crusades, a group of friends for who the plea for “Clorox and a brain brush” is an appropriate one when you really didn’t want that image in your head, a theater where “one, two, six” is proper counting, and a debating society where more than art is “sketch.” In my family it is understood that “absonotely” means “no, I don’t want cream cheese on my bagel, thank you” and “zoomean” is a proper, albeit archaic, perversion of museum.

So now I live on a floor with people from all the various regions of dorkdom. From them I have learned that “intense” isn’t just for camping, and “epic” isn’t just for poetry. I have met people who really do say “dangnabbit” and “tarnation.” People who, like me, understand the subtleties of snark (sarcasm with more cynicism and more love) and the use of punctuation as nouns (question mark?), but also are quicker than I to identify fails, of both the epoch and at life variety. And we’ve ended up at a college where a class pass/fail involved "Scrunching" it (because grades of S/Cr/NC), and that living "off" can mean in Europe, but "off, off" is in an apartment two blocks from campus. Where "floorcest" is a real moral dilemma, but streaking, apparently, isn't. (I have not, will not...ever.)

But, as any sociologist will tell you (hi Yoda) that language acquisition is a collective process, so as a group we've replaced couture with “arb garb” (fashion for the ‘intense’ campers) and we have forged a universal noun in the form of "to yoink". (In English: I yoink. In French: je yoinke. In German; du yoinkst). We’ve learned to "fudge that chicken" rather than any other f-explicative of choice. We’ve combined pigeon Spanish (vamoose) and vector physics to “put out moose in vam direction” and quite often “let’s put our net vector in the ____ (usually dinner) direction.” We’ve also learned that actions speak louder than words, that the Mulderesque Dodgeballers facial expressions (of the “oh, y’all are pathetic” variety) are not only louder, but also more frequent.

I am seeing first hand the making of a very unique dialect.

I remain,
Georgie