The Growth of Tongue

“Arielle you speak too fast.”

I panted lightly having laughed for about forty-five seconds at a joke between me and my sister. I held onto the seat belt, bracing myself for what I was about to hear.

“Slow down! I remember you used to speak very slowly and clearly, I miss that.”

I didn’t want to be mad because my grandmother was only telling me this because she loved me, but I couldn’t escape the fact that she soiled a perfectly good joke.

“I will,” I nodded.

Nyla looked at me. I looked at Nyla. Quite frankly, neither of us really cared about the critique given because our cheeks were too rosy to take our minds off of bursting out laughing. I was silent for the rest of the ride home, because an unmovable lump had grown in my throat. This was not a rare series of events though. My grandmother kept a close eye on us since we’re her only grandchildren and she had so many insecurities about how we grew up, I guess because we’re the first American children she ever had part in raising. Speech is one thing that she payed a lot of attention to because we were city bred, raised around people who had a constant relaxed dialect. It bothered her when she heard someone mashing words together or speaking quickly. Of course, through the eyes of a child I took it was an insult to my handle on the English language.

She wasn’t the only one who noticed the change way I spoke. The older people at my church would always remind me of the me they ‘remember’, the me they miss. I remember that me fondly, the one who went to school with white socks and came home with brown ones; the one whose pigtails were always loose at the ends and who smiled cheekily through missing front teeth. The one who wrote a letter and displayed it in front of the whole church.

The same people would always remind me how when I was younger I would pronounce my words very clearly, but I don’t anymore. I just laugh at their remarks. I always laugh.

I’ve only grown about two feet since I was in first grade, therefore it’s always completely understandable to be quickly reminded of my younger self and the way I once behaved. Little do they know I’ve changed so much. Little do they know that since the letter I moved out of the small two-bedroom apartment I and had started public school and morphed into an inner-city kid who knew a lot more slang since my Christian school days. I’m sure they don’t even realize that I won two spelling bees, gained a plethora of new words and phrases and opinions, and had even seen the seven hardest years of her life.

I was always being given a mirror to compare myself with the girl looking back at me, always told how a young me was a better and how ‘I grew up too fast’, even if it wasn’t always directly. My sarcasm baffles my aunts and uncles who last saw me in diapers and I surprise them when I talk about the media or politics. I outgrew the same hand-me-downs from my older sister the same way I outgrew my old tongue. I was once an optimistic brat who always had too much to say with words spilling over the brim but was also too smart for her own good. It was a short time ago that I realized that my language was a party trick, the one thing people noticed about me because it was always unpredictable. I think that’s what adults love about kids, seeing what kind of madness they’re going to crank out of their juvenile brains before they even realize what they’re doing. I walked head-first into a lot of those situations when I was young, clumsily stumbling into my own language that would finally reach its final stage of evolution. Unfortunately, it was a language that people could no longer recognize. I was older, mindful and had a lot to say. It was hard for people to identify the me I had become.

Ghandi once said: “Language is an exact reflection of the character and growth of its speakers.” I consider speech as a significant sign of growth because it is one of how much it changes. Environment, experiences, and even people are large contributors to the elements of one’s language, and just as children grow, so does one’s tongue.