The Oyster
The Beatles once sang, "I am the Walrus." Well, I am the oyster. The Washington Post has an annual contest where they ask people to play with words. As a contestant, you can either add, change, or delete a letter of a pre-existing word and then give the new word a new definition, or you can redefine a word that is already in the dictionary. One of the words that was redefined this year was "oyster." The new definition is "a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions." That's me. I'm an oyster. I'll have E help me figure out how to give you a link to this year's top choices for the word contest. There's fun to be had for all.
The point of this is to tell you that lately I've been paying a lot of attention to the language that I hear. As E told you, I'm an English teacher and a reader. I've been fascinated with language for as long as I can remember. I even thought about majoring in Linguistics, but decided that my career choices might be kind of (or "kinda" as my kids write in their essays) limited if I went down that path. Anyway, I've had many of my own catch phrases, but they've usually started only after I've heard someone else use them or after I've made a supremely embarrasing mistake in my own pronunciation of words/names/phrases that should be rather easy. For example, when you see Chick-Fil-A, you probably think "chick fillet." When I see Chick-Fil-A, I think "chick fill uh." Not so smart, but damn funny when you consider that I only figured out the "chick fillet" thing a couple of years ago (I'm 24, and a reader, in case you were wondering). So now I use it all the time. "Wanna go to chick fill uh for lunch?" Another restaurant name that I enjoy is Chipotle, except that I was inspired by the Jack in the Box commercial (the one where the mouth line is drawn into different squiggles as the head tries to pronounce the word) to call it "chipoodle." So I do. Good story.
As a teacher, I have lots of humorous stories about silly things that the kids do. I hold on to these moments for dear life when I'm dealing with the not-so-silly things that they do. In order to remind myself daily that teaching isn't all that bad, I set some of their phrases up as my cell phone greeting. Everytime I open my phone, I am reminded that there is fun to be had at the expense of America's youth. For example, in one of his most recent papers, my smartest...I'll say that again....SMARTEST ninth grader wrote, "this reminded him not to take anything for granite." For granite. I will never take my ninth graders for granite again. I love it! Then, another one, not so smart, but a good kid nonetheless, writes, "he o most forgot his responsibility to his wife." It's a damn good thing I got the phonetics problem worked out with Chick-Fil-A because I might never have figured this out otherwise. I stared at the paper for the longest time trying to figure out whether the kid meant to type "on", "or", or "of" when it finally dawned on me. He was trying to say "almost." Oy.
On a slightly different note, last night I went to a comedy club with a few of my friends. When we walked in the guy who was seating us asks if we want to sit right up front. Now, T, B, and I are all a little on the shy side and wanted to avoid being made fun of by the comedian when he ran out of jokes, so we say, "no thank you." The seater walks to the left of the stage and seats us IN THE FRONT ROW. Now, I may not be able to pronounce Chick-Fil-A properly, but that's got more to do with phonetics than with understanding basic English. We spent most of the evening ensuring that we were demonstrating amusement at the jokes because we didn't want the comedian to call undue attention us. All in all, it was a fun evening, and by the end we were glad that the seater didn't seem to understand our English because we had great seats and managed to avoid the spotlight.
Here's the last story for the day. The long post is to make up for my recent absence, but this is it. I promise. The other day, I was listening to a friend of mine explain one of her many theories about the lives that we lead. I was shocked when I heard myself absentmindedly respond, "I'm pickin' up what you're puttin' down." Now, I honestly don't think that I have heard or used that phrase since 2001. I'm not sure where it came from, but then I was telling my friend T about this and she asks, "what does that mean exactly? Is that the same as saying, 'I'm smellin' what you're steppin' in?'" Ummm....yes. I believe that it is. Though, I can honestly say that I've NEVER heard or used that phrase until yesterday evening. It was so shockingly T that all I could think to say was "oy."
posted by K @ 2:08 PM
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