Tartan

Issue date: 4/21/05 Section: News

One day during the hazy mist that was my high school experience, I was hanging out with a few friends when one of them commented on the fact that they had never heard me swear before. I thought about it for a few moments, and then realized that he was right - I don't swear, and if I do, I make sure no one is around to hear it. Until then, there was no particular reason for my non-vulgar vocabulary styling, except for pure instinct that swearing is bad. We discussed the topic for the rest of the period, and by the end we all vowed to reduce our swearing output significantly from then on. We unanimously agreed that swearing simply makes you seem less intelligent. Besides being one of the few things that I actually learned that week, I realized that I'm not the only one that takes into account language and how its use can affect our personalities.

The way that we speak, from our use of words to the way we pronounce them, affects how everyone around us perceives us. It's fairly easy to realize that someone who swears and has improper grammar comes off as less intelligent than someone who never swears, has an advanced vocabulary, and uses the correct verb tenses. But, someone who speaks too perfectly or uses too many advanced vocabulary words can come off as pretentious and arrogant. A lose-lose situation? Not quite. There are very simple language tools everyone can use to improve their ability to communicate with the people around them.

America is a country where communication could very well be the most important life skill. Some of the most important American values involve teamwork and respect of peers; these values seep into every aspect of the average American's life, especially when considering the inner workings of school, work, family life and religion. How a person communicates with the people around him or her is absolutely vital to that person's success, and maybe even vital to their quality of life.

America is also a country where the rules and tools of language are always changing. We are constantly adding, misusing, and butchering new words and phrases into our vocabulary, usually without even realzing it. Recent vocabulary trends developing in this country are the manipulation of nouns into adjectives and the introduction of uber- into our language. For example, "angsty," which is the noun angst with a -y suffix, is currently being misused as an adjective. Uber, which originates in Germany vernacular (it means "great" or "super") is currently being misused as a prefix, for words such as "ubernerd" and "ubercomputer." If you have not been hearing these words and word misuses at all, don't fret - these are well-documented phenomena (read the book "Slayer Slang") but are not terribly common everywhere in the country.

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