What Do People Think Of You?

“Hey, how are you what are you doing today?” That's how I talk to my elders, but when I talk to my cousins I say “yo what you doin?”  This is just how different the conversation between my elders and young people are, yet they mean the same thing

The language I use is one of the biggest parts of my identity. It might not change what my thought process is or what I really mean but when it comes to communication it means a lot. I have to have a switch when it comes to language use. I talk to everyone differently, I talk to my family differently than I  talk to my friends and my teachers and I talk to my teachers differently than I talk to my boss or a business man/women.

When it comes to my family I talk to my parents, grandparent, aunts and uncles differently than I talk to my cousins. If I talk to my parents and older adults in my family in a bad tone or in a unmannerly fashion it's gonna make me look like a bad child but I don’t go to heavy on speaking proper, I try to speak proper while also using some slang terms that the adults would get. When I talk to my cousins, we have more of a friendly conversation. The conversations are still a little proper but I don’t care at all about my grammar. I don’t because I know they won’t judge me or really care if I didn’t say something correctly.

One time I was talking to my grandmother at a family gathering and I realized how much I articulated and said yes or no.

“Did you have a great day at school?”

“Yes”.

“What did you do today?”

“Today we learned about catalyst in bio-chem class, so that was fun, and I also hung out with friends after school because I did not have Students Run practice”

At the same family event one of my cousins, Ana who’s more intelligent and in college asked me about school and the way I answered was completely different than when my grandmother asked me even though she was in college, she’s still my cousin.

“Did you have fun in school today?”

“Yeah, it was ard.”

“What did you do today?”

“Well ummm, I learned about this thing called catalyst and I ain’t run today so it was okay, oh yeah and I hung out with some peeps”

This was interesting to me. Why did I switch the way I said things? I knew I wanted to be respectful to my grandparents and live up to what I thought were their expectations. I talked to my cousin in that way just so I could fit in. Yeah fit in. All of my cousins speak Black English and I’m the only one who don’t. I often stay silent just because the properness in my voice would break the conversation or at least that’s what I thought would happen. There have been times where my own family called me out and said “Why do you sound white?”, that question shattered me. It made me feel like an outsider, like I was doing it wrong. I never answer to that question, I just smile to hide what’s really going on inside.

“Can I get a caramel macchiato with almond milk”

“Yes sir”

“You don’t have to call me sir, we’re in the same business and I’m no better than you, plus it makes me sound old”

“You sure?”

“Of course dude, your such a well mannered kid”

I recently starting working at a coffee shop called Saxbys. When talking to my boss I try to say yes sir as a sign of respect to someone of a higher level. My boss doesn’t really like it or neither does he care that I call him sir. He thinks it’s really old fashion and makes him seem old. This made me question if words like sir and mam were just slang words. Sir and mam aren’t used in my generation as often.  Some people misunderstand what slang words are. Most people usually think they’re uneducated words that people make up and they become words that lots of people use.