The intended outcome of the post I didn’t want to write was that you would think me smart and awesome. So I was going to pretend to write a post about how times have changed. About how society prizes those who had physical strength and brawn but now intelligence and the mind is what is more highly sought after. The punchline of the article was going to be that it used to be “Fortune favours the brave” but now in today’s climate it’s  “Fortune favours the brain”. (That’s not to say that the old saying is no longer relevant).

Awesome huh? I think it’s awesome. I think it’s awesome because I took an age old saying, modified it slightly by changing two letters and created profound meaning.

This is one for my quotation site.

In this meta-complaint I am going to complain about the word ‘gay’.

I read somewhere about some gay people are being offended that people are now using the word gay as a synonym for the word lame. I repeat: Gay people are being offended that people are using the word gay as a synonym for lame. Tough luck, language evolves. Do you know what gay meant originally? It meant ‘happy’. Then the term evolved to become a synonym for homosexual. And now the word is evolving again. Well not now, it’s actually been changing since 1996 at least.

The truth is that words are evolving all the time. The meaning of the word lame has evolved too. Take a look at wikipedia’s euphemism article.

Trying to stop it is futile and political correctness is not a solution. Just deal with it!

Obviously though, what words evolve and what they evolve into (depending on the word) may be a possible reflection of that society’s prejudices. But that theory needs more than just two case studies.

But that is a different issue all together…

Heh… the word trailers made me think back to my youth when I first used that word. I remember back in the day my family used to call them shorts. The shorts. “Do you want to fast forward past the shorts?”, I would ask. It’s interesting to notice how and why vocabularies change. I have lived a life where I frequently needed to cross the boundaries of vocabularies. By vocabularies I mean slang, colloquialisms or more generally a subset of words. I stayed in a coloured area and probably had only coloured friends at the time. At about 9 years of age I went to a white school. Not sure if “white school” was the correct terminology for it at the time. I don’t really know what the history of the school was up till that point. Perhaps private school is better. A private school with 99.9% of the children being white. A boarding school. Myself and the kids there pretty much got on like a house on fire. So as one does when one becomes part of any group, I picked up a lot of terminology, or slang. I also picked up some nuances of pronunciation as well as an accent.

I find it interesting that the words I picked up and used was conscious process. It’s also interesting to note that I could have attempted to introduce the other kids to the words I grew up with but rather chose to replace those words for their local counterparts or even omit them from interactions altogether. Right at the beginning when all these colloquialisms were new to me, I would incorporate words that would ease communication or prevent me from having to explain what I meant if I had used my own word.

The other interesting thing was that I found nuances of pronunciation and the accent I picked up were not a conscious process. I only noticed I had one when I visited my grandmother on a holiday a year or two later. My grandmother asked me, I can’t remember the exact words but it was something like: “Why do you talk like you are white?”. As I said in the last sentence, I don’t remember the words exactly but I do remember disgust in her voice. I was taken aback. From the tone of her voice I could tell my accent displeased her and in that one comment made me feel as though there was a chance I could no longer be trusted because I no longer speak like her people. My response was, “I don’t talk like I am white?” and immediately forced myself back into rolling my Rs.

From then on I became conscious of how I spoke. It carried on this way for a long time. I’d have a different accent for school and a different accent at home. To this day actually… I still do it. Around my family I can have a different accent than what I normally do. And what’s worse is that often around coloured people, I force my coloured accent. The problem is that this isn’t how I talk anymore so I don’t get practice using the accent anymore also I never really had the opportunity to study it so I can’t even mimic it that well. If that was not bad enough I also find myself using a half forgotten, dated version of the coloured slang I knew when I was 9. So interactions in this mode feel so fake for me. I feel like every word I say is a lie. Which it is. Even though I am telling the truth, the sounds the words make when they reach my ears feel to me as if they are a lie. Anyways I am in the process of fixing this. I am in the process of merging my accents into one.

So yeah, as you can see, I got horribly distracted. My original article was meant to be on expectations. I wanted to talk about expectations because of the hot-cross buns you get in the shop. Eating them (the experience) is never as good as they smell, or half as good I remember them (the expectation). So, I may start a new quest. I may just take up baking to create a hot cross bun to rival the flavour of the ones in my memory – the perfect hot cross bun.

Happy Easter.