As a journalism student, how different people, language, and the world interact are all of great interest to me. However, as often as language can bring me closer both to those I write for and to people I interact with every day, its power to divide is just as strong. I’m not just talking about the recent Olympics and the barrier of language across sports or that something as simple speaking a foreign language in America can bring you to instant suspicion, I’m referring to something a little closer to home. The ever changing — and widening — gap between perceived correctness and communication.
Last week on a family vacation, my grandmother, eternally intelligent and classy, called me out on my use of “me and my sister” in my speech instead of the grammatically correct “my sister and I.” As soon as she pointed out the mistake I corrected myself, but as we found out over the course of the week, that phrase is just ingrained into my syntax and isn’t budging. We were stuck in a never ending wheel of mistake and correction, each of us getting a little frustrated that the other couldn’t find a way to accept the situation. My vacation brain wasn’t about to consciously change how I’d been speaking for the last 20 years, and my grandmother was hardly about to concede the laws of good grammar. I assured her that it was a mistake I’m careful never to make in my writing —where I consider it to count the most — and did my best to convince her I hadn’t faked my way into the higher education system.
But my inability to self-correct 24/7 and assumed correlation between how one speaks and how others view them stayed with me long after I crossed back into the U.S.
How millennials talk has been the subject of much scrutiny and debate in recent years. From the rise of text language when I was in middle school and the subsequent rush of parents to decipher their meanings, to millennial women being corrected on everything: how often we say sorry, the number of times a young women says “like” in a sentence, a soft uplift or trail off at the end of a sentence. It is clear that those confused by the quick paced change in the language of the young are doing their best to figure out what many consider the most important part of how one speaks: how well it showcases your intelligence.
However, this is the thing about language: it can be learned, it can be studied, and anyone can become articulate if they try hard enough. But does it really matter if you’re impressively articulate if you have nothing to say?
A surprising example of this came last year in the form of a journalism class. While I’d spent years assuming that the largest word was the best word in academia, my journalism professor hit us with a bit of real world knowledge: try to relay the information as clearly as possible. Know and connect with your audience, learn their language.
What was taken away from that class was the idea that language is for connection and understanding, and it loses weight in a practical capacity if it’s intentionally used to shut out those considered less intelligent for speaking a certain way. Language elevated to the academic high heavens has its place, but connection and communication with those around me is important, even if it may not fit in with preconceived notions about the right way to speak. Of course, to both my grandmother and my journalism professor that’s no reason to be grammatically incorrect.
The way I speak is a product of my generation, my culture(s), my education, my identity as a woman, and a thousand other factors that have gone into shaping how I present myself to the world when I open my mouth. Some I can learn and control and some are outside of me. Language is changing and growing faster than it ever has before. Why shouldn’t we embrace it?
