Well, it was interesting asking people older than me about language and the responses were informative, comical, and some a bit hostile.  I spoke to my mother, who was born in 1941, and she doesn’t feel like there is a monumental change in our language (English) but small subtle changes over the years. One thing she says is we seem to speak faster and less formally. An example she offered was growing up people would always ask, “how are you?” and now it’s a simple, “How ya doin’?” which is better than saying, “Wassup?” to her.  Besides slang, she believes the newer generation talks faster and uses me as an example claiming I “babble” quickly, running sentences together without any hesitation for a break. She didn’t seem to notice any spelling differences other than more words are abbreviated than she remembers (admin for administrator was an example she gave) but other than that she doesn’t believe so. Some of my older co-workers have some very strong opinions about words used outside their meaning. Some examples that were given, “wicked”, “extra”, “fire”, and “cray cray.” They said in a rather salty tone, “it’s hard to keep up.”  

I do remember when I graduated from college, way back when, and was doing an internship in Boston, I was taking a cab, after just a few minutes of talking to the driver he exclaimed, “You’re from Brooklyn, aren’t you?”  This really caught me off guard and he said it was my accent, “You can just tell” was what he said, lol. I didn’t know what I had said that labelled me a Brooklyn person but I was completely shocked and yet I could tell he was from Boston because of the way he dropped his r’s.

One thing I have noticed since I was a kid is filler words. I survived the 80’s when the word “like” was used to the point of nausea, like really! As a kid growing up in the 70’s it seemed easier to speak and easier to listen to someone because filler words weren’t used as much (that’s my opinion).  Words, such as, “like”, “um”, and “okay” to name a few. I have actually avoided people at work because of their overuse of filler words. I would rather stand there in silence while their brain searches for the next word than listen to “like” 4 times in a sentence.