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So one of the curious things that I learned—and remembered—from my linguistics 
class, was that languages evolve—endlessly and continually. Those of us who take a certain amount of pride in thinking we speak and write well, cringe and lift our self-righteous brows at the sound of mismatched tenses, improper conjugations, and those ugly little prepositions that pop up at the end of sentences. It is so easy to forget that we are trying to harness a growing beast. Our language is as static as a cancer. It has morphed beyond recognition from its early origins as a mess of German and Dutch dialects that moved into Britain through the mouths of invaders. And to say that we Americans speak “English” is an affront to the poor Brits, whose ultra-proper speech we often need subtitles to interpret.
So I’m curious. When did the word “so” push out the infamous filler words, “um, ah, and well?” One day I crawled out of the hole I hide out in and discovered a whole new word usage had stormed the American linguistic scene. Listen to NPR for a day and count how many times you hear a guest speaker, reporter, or commentator begin a sentence with that helpless little word, “so.” Hearing it so often, pardon my poor pun, I start to get annoyed, but then I remember dear Mary Ellen Ryder’s admonitions to her linguistic students. “Speech patterns are different. But there are no wrong speech patterns.”
So in the grand scheme of differing and evolving speech patterns, I guess I can handle that tiny filler word a lot easier than the rudely clichéd “at the end of the day” idiom which I think began on network news stations around 1990 and spread like a plague through all tiers of communication.
So what idioms, grammatical ticks, or newly minted words send shivers down your spine?
Rangewriter 
All of the “young” people I work with seem end their sentences with the word “right?”, right? Maybe in this new age of texting, “right?” at the end of the sentence forces the other person to respond verbally, right? ha ha
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I haven’t paid particular attention to this one. Maybe I shouldn’t, it’ll come my next source of irritation. It sounds to me like a measure of insecurity.
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This one is such a damn throwaway, but I hear it all the time: “Having said that, …” When is it actually necessary to remind people of something said a nanosecond before? Gawd, I hate that phrase.
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Oh, yeah. That’s a good one. Much like “It goes without saying…” Then why say it?
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How about “sort of” and “kind of” and “you know” and “like” (as in “I was sort of like so excited, you know?!”)? I’ve just been doing a transcription where the speaker uses a lot of idioms and it struck me how much we use them to personalize our speech, but then reading your post it hit me they’re also used as a kind of camouflage, to blend in. Most blatantly with teenagers but adults do it all the time, too. (Thinking of business-speak/science-speak, etc. as examples.) Personal speech patterns are always an area of fascination for me.
Great post for us language-geeks. Sometimes idioms and slang irritate me (overuse, it’s like listening to a skip on a record player) but most of the time I’m fascinated. It reminds me of traveling and listening to local dialects and accents, only with a time component instead. I love thinking of language as something organic, more like a living garden than a static arrangement of furniture…you know? 🙂
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Ya know, you’re right, Dia. Language is living. We all use fillers to some degree. President Obama uses “ahh” a lot! Often fillers are a delay tactic to let our brains spin through everything that’s floating around in there until we lock on to the appropriate words. And it’s funny how fillers and idioms pass in and out of style. Remember when everything was “neat?” And I keep trying to remember that idioms define a person’s voice and style. A very important thing to consider when writing dialogue, eh?
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Very much so! My main character uses a LOT of idioms, although they tend to be from a different era which is one of the ways I first started getting a feel for her. She started off being around my age but pretty soon I figured out that she was a few decades older from the way that she talked. Which makes me wonder how many different languages we each carry hidden somewhere inside ourselves that we can draw on when writing. Kind of an interesting thought about the subconscious.
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Dia, I believe you carry whole worlds inside your subconscious.
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Hmmm, the funny bit about these fillers and buzzwords is that I, as a non-native speaker, am probably more aware of their use but simultanously I am also more prone to use them, simply to blend in as Dia put it so aptly. In my attempt to sound more English I tend to copy accents and figures of speech quite freely, with sometimes undesirable results – I’m sorry.
To give my 2 cents to the list of words, I always cringe when profanities are used but are replaced by seemingly inoffensive versions such as “For crying out loud” or “Jiminy Cricket” to spare the religiously sensitive and “What the heck/frill…” or “frigging/freaking/fecking/..:” to avoid the f-word. Who is fooled by that?!
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Yeah, I agree. What would we call that? White washed profanity or scrubbed potty mouth?
I think people who put the effort into learning another language well, have trained their ears to listen carefully for nuance. They become like sponges picking up the beautiful as well as the not so beautiful parts of language. I also tend to pick up the funny little anomalies that occur in English, like the Canadian “eh?” when I’m up north to the infamous Texas “y’all.,” which I hate but it creeps in anyway when I’m with others speaking that way. I don’t know any other languages well enough to have picked up any nuance. I simply mangle it from start to finish. But I can swear a blue streak in German. That was the only German I learned from my mom. Go figure. 😉
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“Like” and “you know” bug me and I cringe when I find myself using them. I remember several years ago, I had to do a presentation at a conference. I was extremely nervous and my boss had me do a run through for her and some of the managers beforehand (not easy!) Afterward, she commented that I didn’t say ‘um’ or ‘uh’ at all. I didn’t even notice, but after she commented on it, I suddenly focused on it and almost slipped them in after that. Better off not thinking about it, I suppose 🙂
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Your boss should have known better than to plant that idea in your subconscious.She was probably jealous because you did so well. I am a total mess talking in front of a group of people or giving a presentation. I have no idea what comes out of my mouth, but I know none of it is correct and little of it makes sense. I guess that is why I prefer to write.
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So anyways, me and Tiffany went to the store, and like we had a cool time.For whom was this blog written? Seriously, “anyways” drives me crazy. I don’t think it’s in the dictionary. I thought it was an adolescent thing, but I hear professional adults use it all the time. I still cringe. My mom used to tell us when someone said on the phone, “Is Rae Ann there?” I was to respond, “This is she.” Sounded very formal, but that’s what I still do. My college educated, intelligent daughter still says, “Me and John are going to the store,” even though I’ve told her since she was 12, to say, “John and I.” In writing, I can’t abide those “scare quotes.” 🙂 Thanks for a thought provoking blog.
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That’s a good one Rae Ann! Is is really unexpected to hear highly educated people speak that way. Years ago when my husband and I were having a house built, we had a wonderful builder, highly regarded in the community, capable, knowledgeable, but he had the funniest grammar issues. A favorite of his was, “I’ve did that before.” Erich and I would just look at each other and try not to smile…or frown.
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I’m with Dia — “Sort of” drives me crazy. I hear it all the time, sometimes twice in the same sentence. People on the radio seem prone to it, especially when they’re trying to sound intelligent.
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“Sort of” really has invaded the lexicon. I notice it particularly in the entertainment industry. As a matter of fact, perhaps that is why I absolutely can not listen to more than 4 minutes of late-night TV celeb shows…or whatever they call themselves.
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A lot of my peers (particularly girls and young women) cannot stop themselves from using “like” as a filler word. It annoys me, mostly because I used to suffer from the same affliction, and hearing my recorded voice played back for me and “like” being uttered every 3 or 4 words made me realize how annoying I sounded. Now that I have a boyfriend whose native language is not English, I hear this filler word “like” quite often because the majority of his teachers were young women. Both of us are working on not using filler words in English.
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I really notice idioms and fillers when talking to non-native speakers. I wonder how in the heck they ever learn our language with all that added nonsense to wade through!
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I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit in two high school age advanced English composition courses for non-native speakers taught by another non-native speaker when I had my rotary exchange year in Austria. There were some lessons about idioms in particular–but mostly British idioms, because the teacher did her exchange year in London. People, at least in Europe, really get drilled in English. Most start learning at seven, and by their equivalent to our Junior year of high school, they are typically only a few years behind what a typical native speaker is able to do (or in some cases, beyond what some native speakers can do). But yeah, Europeans don’t really skip anything when teaching English here. They cover everything and anything.
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My experience verifies yours. I have German relatives and hosted one of them as an exchange student when he was 17. He not only knew more about the American political system (stayed up all night to watch the Bush-Gore vote debacle) but his English was very good. He found the high school courses 3-4 years behind his at home in material. Even in AP chemistry, he said he’d already done all of the experiments that the class did. He explained that in upper level English courses (which he hated) they learned the differences between American, Australian, and British English.
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Yes, the German and Austrian school systems don’t have a lot of required frivolous (at least, in my opinion) electives like Home Economics or classes like Outdoor Education and Web Design. Instead of taking these kinds of electives, the students just take chemistry and physics or biology nearly every year and surpass most American high school students in their general knowledge of the sciences. I couldn’t participate in my class’s Physics course because it was about two levels past where I was, even though the majority of my science hours in school were in physics and astronomy.
In my senior year of high school, I only learned about the differences between Austrian German and German German because we had an exchange student from Austria in the class. Then in a college course, the professor didn’t really have much time to go over everything he would have wanted pertaining to the differences between Austrian, Swiss, and German dialects, so we barely touched on it. I find most German majors in the States lacking in knowledge of German dialects so much that they treat my usage of typical Austrian German words as an error. I find that with American English students as well in the case of using traditional grammar. I think part of the reason why our language is evolving so much is because we’re not learning proper grammar for whatever reason in school (I find that this is mostly because of teachers just not having enough time to cover everything because they have to go slower on the material for people who are not getting it, or there just isn’t enough time in the year to go over everything just because of the nature of the way our schedules are set up). If students aren’t learning proper grammar in grade school, then they won’t use it as adults and their children will learn how to speak based on their parents’ language patterns, and then go to school and learn only a small portion of proper grammar.
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Thanks for keeping an interesting discussion going!
I hear your frustration with some of the elective courses offered in American schools. Too often they seem merely vehicles to get unmotivated kids through the system. And we seem to cater, always, to the lowest common denominator in our schools. The German system separates life goals early on; perhaps that helps to keep to University bound students working at a higher level. There are pros and cons to that system as well. But mainly, it seems to work well for them.
Even 40 years ago, I was frustrated by having to relearn grammar from the ground up EACH YEAR! I couldn’t believe it when in the 9th grade, we began the English class with ‘what is a noun and what is a verb?’I actually learned the nuts & bolts of grammar from my elective language courses. And fortunately, I grew up in a home where I learned essentially good grammar, so it was organic for me.
All that said, language will always evolve. Just as thought and our understanding of the world evolves. Every language has evolved, including German. Within the last 20 years, Germany even revamped it’s alphabet to modernize the language. And, not all American students are bad, dumb, slow, or ill-informed. I’ve met some high school students who were brilliant, articulate, well-informed about local and global politics, and skilled at research. While knowing how to use language effectively is important, I am actually more interested in developing students’ ability to think independently and deeply. Even here in the blogosphere, I see writing that is grammatically painful, yet the ideas and the honesty expressed are more valuable than all my own fussing over correctness.
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Yes, I went to school in the American public system and have plenty of brilliant friends who passed through it (I’m not particularly sure if I am brilliant like the ones I am thinking of though). But I’ve also seen just an amazing number of high schoolers who had lower reading comprehension levels than my reading comprehension level in the 4th grade, and when you see things like that–maybe not isolated cases, but in numerous numbers, it kind of makes you cringe and wonder why we as a nation are not more worried about this problem.
As to different English dialects, I see a great importance in making use of such dialects and improper grammar in fiction. It makes for a more culturally rich experience if you can stay true to the kind of words your characters would have said, depending on where they live or are coming from. I got kind of fed up with the coordinator of my creative writing program in university because she wouldn’t acknowledge such novels as legitimate literature, and I know of some non-white people in that group who were even more angry about that than I was. We thought that she focused a bit too much on the culture and language style of middle class white Americans, while ignoring other cultures, and she actually criticized someone’s story because they wrote it in a dialect that same semester.
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Unfortunately, money seems to be part of the problem here. Money and commitment to excellence. We have forgotten how important the notion of EDUCATION used to be to this country when it was young. The first community building was usually a church and/or a school…often the same building. Everyone paid, everyone helped, all kids, rich or poor were given an opportunity AND each kid was expected to apply themselves. Now, with the focus on reducing taxes, squabbling over curriculum, and social issues that weigh down and distract the business of learning, we are falling way behind the rest of the world.
You are absolutely right about the importance of vernacular in good fiction. You are a good observer and therefore you will be able to convey your characters with sparkling reality! Good for you. Persevere!
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Hi Linda, me again. I just had the pleasure to spend some time with some younger folks. Gee, not too long ago that’s what I thought of myself! But I digress. Just had to think of you and this post here when, within a couple of minutes, two of those new inventions popped up: “amazeballs” and “chillax”. Both are presumably “cooler” (is this word still “in”?) versions of another word, something that young people never get tired of coming up with. While I had heard the first one only once before, the latter one seems to have pervaded the English language almost completely, nearly replacing the old-fashioned “relax”. It will be very interesting to see whether “amazeballs” will make it to this stage as well.
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Interesting indeed, Sandra. AMazeballs! I’ve never heard that one. I wonder if it’s regional, not that I spend much time with kids these days…although I’m surrounded by college kids. Chillax…Same as chill? Chillin’? I’ve heard that one a lot. But never chillax. It does seem that kids drive language trends. Perhaps that’s why we…ah…mature folk… tend to get all bent out of shape about those changes. It is amazing how long cool has been cool. Thanks for sharing this observation. I”ll have my ears wagging.
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Oh chillax, you’re not THAT mature! It’s mainly used instead of the more old-fashioned “relax”. And who is getting bent out of shape? Just observing… 😉
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Thanks for offering a much hand in the NEXT new cultural revolution. I’m always a day late and a million short. Just chillaxin’ here. Can I do that?
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Sounds fine to me 🙂
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