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.

Blog Post #3

Well, this assignment was not as easy as I thought it would be for the simple reason of deciding on a single word from what is an unlimited selection.  At first, I went with the word ‘sayonara’ because it’s a cool word that I use a lot while destroying Moblin’s and Lynel’s in the Legend of Zelda video game. Unfortunately, my research only found small blurbs or short articles about how ‘sayonara’ “may have” transformed over the years in the Japanese vocabulary and found its way into the English language. With such uncertainty I went to my vault of favorite words and came up with ‘tsunami’ as I love watching natural disasters.  

Tsunami, meaning “harbor wave,” is also borrowed from Japanese language and is the combination of two words.  “Tsu” for harbor and “Nami” for wave. The word ‘tsunami’ has a long history in Japan that is over 1000 years, but it wasn’t until the late 1800’s that it would begin being used, scarcely, in the English language.  It would become a more commonly used word after the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami that hit Indonesia, killing 32,000 people.  Strangely, if not amusing, the term ‘tidal wave’ was replaced by the word ‘tsunami’ because ‘tidal wave’ was not an accurate description of what the event was (it has nothing to do with the tide) and it was replaced by the word, tsunami, that  is also not completely accurate to what the natural event is (it does not just happen in harbors).

But I digress, in Japan the word tsunami is pronounced with the ‘t’ as it does not violate their phonotactic constraints but when it became a borrowed word in American English, it did not conform to the word-initial consonant cluster constraints of the English language and thus it was adapted by dropping the sound of ‘t’ just pronouncing it as,  tsunami : /suˈnɑmi/.

I do not have any recollections of teachers correcting my grammar, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen but I just don’t recall any (it was 40 years ago). I do have many memories of family correcting my grammar. ‘Ain’t’ was not a word to say around my mother. Once when I told her, “I ain’t got homework” she said I obviously didn’t study enough if I was saying “ain’t” as it wasn’t a word. I was told to go read a book instead of watch tv (the horror). My Aunt Jane was terrifying if she had to correct your writing or speech. Whatever was said ‘improperly’ was corrected with a lecture followed by being told I sounded uneducated and needed to speak English properly in life if I wanted to get ahead. (I had a habit of asking if I could ‘borrow’ her bathroom instead of saying ‘use’ the bathroom.) Of course my two older sisters weren’t as nice, and they would correct any perceived grammatical error by laughing and saying I sounded like an idiot (I’m pretty sure I said “ain’t” in some sentences to them). To this day I can not seem to remember the rule concerning ‘I’ vs ‘Me’ and will just spit out several options and let the listener choose their preference and kind of hide the fact I’m not confident in the correct way to say it. So although I am sure there was a prescriptivism structure of teaching grammar in school when I was growing up, most of the corrections were made and enforced at home. And today at the age of 55, I am still scolded by my mother if I use some choice words even if I am describing my boss on a bad day at work. Her reasoning is that it sounds uneducated if I curse a lot.