Eish its bebbing

Reading Fred Khumalo's blog post Yo, niggaz, whaz happenin’ to da English? reminded me of an incident from when I was in the USA a month or so back. I was waiting at the bus stop on the University of Illinois campus one evening, on my way home. There was another guy waiting at the bus stop, a youngish black guy, probably a student. I was standing quite close to the bench he was sitting on and he greeted me. Or maybe I greeted him, I don't remember. I always feel its good to greet people.

Anyway, he then said something completely unintelligible to me, a couple of sentences. I tried to muddle them out in my mind but eventually gave up. "Pardon me?" Another, longer, string of phrases I couldn't make head or tail of. Asking people to repeat themselves too many times is embarrassing, but I really didn't understand anything he said. "Sorry I didn't understand you..." Another few mystifying sentences. I think I may have recognised the word "mother." Maybe, maybe, the word "red." But he was wearing a red track suit top, and I was pulling at straws, so maybe there was no red.

I smiled and gave up. There was clearly no hope.

I don't know. Part of me wants to sigh and say: "What is happening to young people nowadays?" Another part of me knows that that would probably be hypocritical. I'm really not averse to slang at all. I'm sure hanging out with my friends would be a mystifying experience for many other people. Bebbing and duuring and "Sisi, sisi I just want to tell you that you are very selfish," "We go" Indian slang from Minz, the classic Zimbabwean "item item" and so forth.

And I know that languages change all the time. In one epic argument with a flatmate of mine, I claimed that "conscientize" was not a word. I was quite wrong of course. It wasn't in the dictionary though. Who cares? Words are in the dictionary because people use them, people don't use them because they are in the dictionary. And who gets to choose the way language changes? Surely the people who use it?

But on the other hand, there is a place where we actually just need to ability to communicate with people, to express ourselves in a way other people understand and to express ourselves in a polite, respectful and professional way. "Yo 'sup dawg?" may be perfectly fine when addressing your mate, but not so much when you're addressing your mother. Or your boss. Or the lady behind the till at the post office.

Someone commented on Fred Khumalo's blog that this kind of poor English is a sad symptom of kids not reading. Its a revealing comment, I think, because it points to the fact that more often than not poor English isn't just the choice to buy into popular slang. Its a result of people just not being exposed to English spoken well. And even as I write that part of me thinks "Well isn't that unfair? Who is to say that the way I was brought up speaking English is good English?"

But objectively I think that a wide range of vocab and the ability to express yourself in language appropriate to many different social situations is important. Its a skill, like any other, that can be developed. And I'm very grateful that I grew up being sent to the dictionary to look up words for myself, and even for those awful Standard 5 vocab lists we had to learn.

It was there I learned that plump was really just a synonym for fat. I called my mom on that one - I was quite a *ahem* plump kid, and she always used to say I wasn't fat, I was plump. Yup, my 12 year old self empowered by vocabulary.