It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Tag: language

Day 346: baby shower

January 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

We had a baby shower today, which was joyful and exhausting. The baby got a lot of cool new things (like this awesome diaper cake) and I got a newfound appreciation for the ability to suck liquid from a baby bottle. I also learned, for a short time, what life would be like with a lisp.

You see, we had a contest/game where we competed to see who could empty a baby bottle the fastest. It took me about twelve and a half minutes to empty half the bottle (considerably behind everyone else, some of whom cheated but others who were simply better babies than I was). But the worst part was that after all that hard work, my tongue and jaw muscles had somehow tired themselves out in a way that I had an unavoidable lisp. Try as I might, I could not pronounce an S sound without considerable work and difficulty.

While it was humorous because I knew that I would regain control of my mouth soon (and the lisp eventually wore itself out in the span of 10 minutes or so), it gave me some insight into what life must be like for people who can’t get rid of their lisp that easily. It was so frustrating to know what something should sound like yet not be able to pronounce it correctly.

It also made me anxious to, well, have this baby already. I’m not saying that I want it to arrive early, but now that we’re even more surrounded by baby objects, it’s hard to not imagine an actual baby sleeping in our crib or wearing his onesies or barfing on all the receiving blankets we have now.

Day 290: long in the tooth

November 28, 2009 / / 0 Comments

You know what I like? Idioms.

Idioms separate the native speakers from those that learned English from a book or in a classroom.  Idioms are often illogical and fly in the face of reason, but they stick around because of their sheer charm.

If a person could live like an idiom, what a world this would be.

You know what I enjoy more than idioms?  Foreign people who use idioms slightly incorrectly or too often, because they’ve just learned them and want to show off their knowledge of the language.

I enjoy this partially out of the complex linguistic niche that idioms fill and how hard it is to describe when learning English.  But I think I also enjoy it partially because I wish I could use idioms that often, that I could get away with it.  As it is, I’m relegated to using them only when they are one of the most popular (“let’s call it a day”) or in the rare occasion when I want to sound obtuse (“long in the tooth”).  How I wish I could sprinkle them in conversation as if I had just learned them, beaming with pride and satisfaction for mastering a complex turn of phrase.

When all is said and done, though, I’m all talk and no cider anyway.

Day 82: for the lulz

May 4, 2009 / / 0 Comments

How did we get here? How did we get to the point where the phrase “for the lulz” means something that most of my readership may actually understand without having to look it up on Urban Dictionary?

It’s been a long strange path from Abraham Lincoln’s first smiley to the widespread use and acceptance of LOL in online chats to the smaller-spread and begrudging use of LOL in actual speech to the somewhat wider spread of the reach of the words (phrases?) “lolz” and “rofl” – the second pronounced like waffle with an r for the uninitiated.

I’m not sure when it became OK for people to say Internet chat acronyms, but I think it has happened for our generation. It’s not frowned upon as much as it was perhaps only five years ago, and it can often be used as a way to subtlely differentiate between true laughter and a kind of snarkier that’s-not-really-funny laughter.

Sidebar: I just saw six adults dance ballet in mouse costumes.

I’m not saying that I’m against using Internet speak in our vernacular. I used to think that it was a crude way to use our language, but it’s really a different form of expression. It’s a way of bonding with people who have spent as much time online as you have. It’s an inside joke for an entire generation. It’s, even, in some senses, a tiny form of rebellion against those strict rules of the language you were taught in school.

So the next time someone actually says OMG or FTW instead the actual words (saving no actual time, as the phrases contain the same amount of syllables either way), don’t roll your eyes at them. Embrace it. Ask if you can has a cheezburger.

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