Learn From Each Other

Intro

My goal for this essay was to express how language plays a big part in the division of our country.  If we could cut down on the judgement of the way people speak, we could learn a lot more from each other and establish better relationships.

Where you live or where you are from plays a big part in literacy or language in general.  Traveling to different places and meeting people from different places can make one realize that there is different forms of language that live inside one language itself.

“The mission statements of major publishers are littered with intentions, with their commitments to diversity, to imagination, to multiculturalism, ostensibly to create opportunities for children to learn about and understand their importance in their respective worlds.”

This quote from “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature” to me is saying how writer try to pick up different forms of literacy or different forms of language to make their writing more interesting.  It’s crazy how people will read a book or poem or an article that has language in it that they don’t understand but they try their hardest to because it is a good read.  Or, a movie that has different forms of language in it that they don’t understand but they try to understand because they heard it is a good movie.  But in person or in reality when it comes to hearing these different forms of a language that we know very well the will to understand or learn is nonexistent.  

I go to Ocean City MAryland every summer with my family.  It is a vacatio city and people come there from Philly, Delaware, New York, New Jersey, etc, so you are bound to meet some people from different areas of the east coast.  This year when I was there.  I would play basketball everyday no matter if it was in the morning, afternoon, or under the lights I would play either by myself or with the people I was on vacation with.  On rare occasions I would have the court to myself but most of the time there would be people on the court so I would only have half of the court.  One day i went to play and there were people on one half of the court so I went to the other half just to shoot around.  Maybe like 10 or 15 minutes after I get to the court I hear “Aye what it is dummy?” I turned around confused because I thought he was talking to me but I didn’t respond.  He say “you wanna run a game?” I say “yeah let's get it”.  But I was still confused so I asked him what he said before to get my attention and he said “I said aye what it is dummy”.  I never heard anyone say that before so I had to ask him where he was from.  It turns out that he was from Baltimore and “what it is dummy” is a way to get someone’s attention in Baltimore slang.  He was confused with the word “jawn” when I used it and I explain to him the “jawn” is basically a noun… It can represent anything.  What I’m saying is we can learn from each other and slang is one of those things that the people that are not used to it will not understand understand.  So instead of staying in the blue and being fine with not understanding, ask questions and live up to the saying “learn something new everyday” it has its benefits.