“Hey dude!”
“Is that supposed to be some kinda rye remark?”
“Willya get off the grass and listen to me, dude? I’m tryin’ t’ ask ya a question!”
“Yer tryin’, dude, I’ll give ya that.”
“Sheesh, dude. Why do I bother?”
“Y’could ask OC yer question.”
“No way, dude! He’d keep me up half the night, and then he’d start in explainin’ his explanation!”
“So?”
“So how come Damitri over there can use the ‘N’ word, an’ I can’t?”
“What ‘N’ word? You tellin’ me we can’t use words startin’ with ‘N’?”
“Aw c’mon, dude, you know what ‘N’ word I mean! Especially on MLK Day!”
“Better be sure o’ that, dude. ‘Cause there’s trouble if’n y’take this kinda thing too far. Y’already can’t say the ‘A’ word, or the ‘B’ …”
“Couple o’ those.”
“Or the ‘C’ …”
“Not that any gal will let you near …”
“Same as you, dude! Couple different ‘D’ words. An’ then, of course, there’s ‘F’ …”
“The famous nuclear bomb, but there’s one or two more that are kinda …”
“Uh uh, dude. Don’t use the ‘G’ word. Or the ‘H’ or the ‘J’ or the ‘K’ or the ‘L’ or the ‘M’ …”
“An’ for the love of Mike, don’t put ‘M’ and ‘F’ together! Um, can I say ‘Mike’?”
“I dunno what you can say no more, dude!! How the h … – oh, d … – what are we supposed to use to talk to each other? Sign language?”
“Y’use that with me all the time, dude. ‘Course, it’s kinda a one-word vocabulary …”
“One y’have a small chance of understandin’! Look, dude, I gotta do somethin’! I ever told you how frustratin’ it is for a Mac guy to live in a PC world?”
“Only like every five minutes. An’ you ain’t answered my question.”
“What question?”
“The one I asked at the top of the page, dude! How come Damitri over there can use the ‘N’ word, an’ I can’t?”
“I can’t believe you don’t get this. You hang with Damitri?”
“What?!? Dude, I don’t know what he did, but I wasn’t in on it!”
“Precisely. Dude, language is about belongin’. Me ‘n’ ma posse, we belong, and we got power over what we say an’ do. You don’ belong, boy, you don’t got no power. You don’ try to use our language, use yer own. An’ if we got you confused over whether it’s our language or not, so much easier to show how you don’ belong and don’ got no power over us – in fact, it’s we what got power over you. That ‘N’ word is ours. You try to use it, we jump all over you. Got it?”
“Yeah, dude. But it kinda makes me a little nervous.”
“It should oughta do that, dude, d … , oh, arrrggh!“
Don’t most groups, no matter what their color, use words to determine who is in and who is out? Isn’t that what slang and jargon are all about? Maybe we should ban speech altogether.
Tempt me not, Q. But, of course, you are correct. Ever wonder how the ‘major languages’ of the world – Chinese, Greek, Latin, (heaven help us) English – came to be major languages? It wasn’t their intrinsic superiority as languages. Chinese writing is so difficult, a Korean king made an everlasting name for himself by coming up with a script simple enough for more than three people to actually use. And we won’t even mention the oxymoronic “rules of English grammar”. Or spelling. Or pronunciation. No. Each of these languages was a language of Empire. Talk about power trips.
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i’m keeping my mouth shut…
Well done!