Languages in LA

I can tell how long students have been in this country more by how they talk to one another than by how they talk to me. Those who have been in the States for less than a year find a fellow expatriot and they stick together like glue. The girls especially, linking arms in the schoolyard and travelling together with the tight, coordinated movements of dolphins. Boys cluster in linguistically homogenous groups.

After a year or two, they start to branch out. Armenian and Mexican boys will sometimes overcome ethnocentric animosities to discover a mutual love of soccer or basketball. Thai girls become friends with Filipinas, and giggle together during class over pictures of androgynous boys on CD covers. By this time, I usually have to wield the seating chart in a punitive manner, causing much hate and discontent.

But most interesting are the conversations I overhear between students, usually Latino, who have been in the States for four years or more. They code-switch. Their conversations move naturally from English to Spanish and back. Sometimes the topic dictates the language; what happened during lunchtime’s soccer game is discussed in Spanish. But then, when complaining about all the homework in Science, it’s in English.

Often they will converse quickly in English till they need a word that they don’t know, and will switch to Spanish to confer briefly about the word they need. The word is usually supplied in Spanish, used, and then the conversation continues in Spanish for a while before switching back to English when a new topic is discussed.

Listening to the talk is fun. Intercepting the notes they pass is not as much fun. The code switching is still there, but I find myself sighing often. “Sweetie, there’s a t in bitch. And you spelled my name wrong”.

Since I live right behind the Scientology Celebrity Center in Hollywood (where the Mothership will dock), I sometimes meet young recruits armed with clipboards. Apparently, one of the initial requirements is to pester the local citizenry to submit to an audit.

An audit consists of asking the same question about 40 times (literally) to see if you will crack. If you crack, I suspect it’s meant to prove to the recruit that those who have not been cleansed of… whatever… or have low tolerance for weird, repetitive tasks. Thus one day, when I was out walking my cat, I was approached by a diffident but determined young thetanist who wanted to audit me.

I was on my third gin & tonic, so I said “Sure.”

She asked me to close my eyes (I did, and nearly lost my balance). Then she said to open my eyes and find “a brand new world.” Humoring her, I looked around, pointed at an apartment across the street, and said, “I’ve never seen in that window before. That’s a brand new world in there.”

She said carefully, “Thank you. Now I ask you to close your eyes again. Thank you. Now open them up and find a brand… new… world.” This went on for about 20 minutes. I looked around and noticed a bird’s nest in a street sign. A leaf blowing into a gutter. An ant colony circling a rose bush. On and on and on. I am positive she was waiting for me to crack. I was too drunk to crack, so finally she thanked me and went away.

Now I’m left wondering… did Katie Holmes have to go through that? Surely I’d have noticed Katie Holmes wandering around with a clipboard in my neighborhood.

Hmm.

Depends on how many gin & tonics I’d had.

When I lived in Virginia, I-64 was a pertinent fact of life. I knew every exit on 64, east and west, between Norfolk and Williamsburg. If I had to give directions, I gave them by that interstate. “You take 64 West toward Yorktown…”

In Michigan it was I-69 that cut through my small town, and it was common to give directions beginning with, “Well, you know I-69?”.

But in L.A., for some reason, highways are prefaced with the. I don’t know why this is, but it doesn’t take newcomers long to catch on. “You take the 101.” Or rather, you don’t take the 101 if you can avoid it. Better to limp down Vermont on crutches than take the 101. It’s awful. But why are the highways here all “the 405,” and “the 110”?

What’s particularly odd is that I didn’t even notice this little quirk until I referred to the 101 as simply “avoiding 101” and my neighbor from New York, said, “Oh, you haven’t started calling it the 101 yet? You’ve been here for a year!”

Even on the local news, “the 101 is backed up from exits 6A to 3B” (again. Still.) And “if you can, take the 405.”

Maybe it’s an unconscious distancing mechanism to avoid the familiarity of naming. Or maybe it’s a statement about driving on them; our freeways aren’t a place, like “Los Feliz” or “Inglewood.” They’re an experience, like “the accident” and “the tax audit” or “the pothole that nearly broke my car’s frame on Wilshire, near 3rd,” or “the time I got arrested in Turkey.” Okay, they aren’t quite that bad. But they’re close. They’re the clogged arteries of a frantic heart.

When I grew up in Michigan, we drank pop. Whether it was Pepsi, Coke, or 7-Up, it was pop, as in “Wanna pop?” Soda was a difficult transition for me when I left Michigan 22 years ago. But my little sister, who has recently joined me in L.A., had already begun transitioning from pop to soda some years ago. I wondered, why would a Michigander - still in Michigan - start calling it soda?

I’m a denizen of a political website, and we have our own lingo. I was reading a story online this morning about the rising rate of violent crime in London, titled “Britons Fear Rise of the Yob.” Of course, we all began asking the same question: what’s a yob? British lurkers came out of the woodwork to tell us: it’s a young thug.

“Ah,” we said, “a yute”. This is our term for young thug. It stems from a cynical awareness that newspaper stories written by those with secret sympathies for the perceived underdog have a tendency to characterize marauding vandals as “disadvantaged youth” (now imagine some hairy, smirking thug telling a police officer in a heavy Brooklyn accent, “It ain’t my fawlt officuh, I’ma disadvantaged yute.”).

But such lingo as “yute” is specific to my online community. It’s not geographical. I am wondering if soon geographical linguistic communities will be, if not replaced, at least matched by cyber linguistic communities. I certainly talk more to my online fellow denizens than I do to the neighbors. After all, neighbors move. Online is often more stable. And my little sister is a true MySpace freak. Is that where she picked up soda?

The day may be coming when, rather than hear an accent and ask “Where are you from?” we might hear a word and wonder, “what’s your URL?”.

No experience so far symbolizes Los Angeles more to me than an incident which occurred shortly after I relocated here. My car had died on arrival, so I settled in Hollywood and used public transportation for three months. Most days I just met schizophrenics who had found Jesus, but one day I saw an incident.

An elderly woman with a walker was struggling onto the bus on the corner of Sunset and LaBrea. When she finally reached the top of the steps, the driver looked down and saw, to his horror, that she had slashed the thin skin of her leg against something and blood was running down freely. The woman looked down and saw the blood. Feeble already, she began to shake and speak agitatedly… in Armenian. The bus driver, who was African-American, helped her to a seat but could not communicate with her. He went to his radio for help.

We waited for an ambulance. There were only eight other people on the bus, and none of us spoke Armenian. After a moment, a young Mexican man came, knelt down in front of her, and offered his bandanna to wrap around her leg. He didn’t speak Armenian, she didn’t speak Spanish, and the hovering bus driver didn’t speak either language. But with gestures they communicated, and the driver moved the walker aside while the Mexican passenger bound the Armenian woman’s leg with his bandanna. She patted his arm gratefully and thanked him in words he couldn’t understand, but in tones we all could.

Eventually we were all transferred to another bus, leaving the Armenian lady with the arriving paramedics. That was it. It wasn’t terribly dramatic. But it was touching, and when I think of L.A., I don’t think of the chi-chi cafes of Sunset Plaza, or the airy, shallow denizens of the entertainment industry. I think of that day on the bus.

It’s Friday afternoon, and my students are milling about. The bell is about to ring, releasing them for lunch. Some of them, who have not stepped over that threshold into young adulthood, will run out screaming and jostling. The others will stroll out more slowly, surreptitiously checking their cellphones for messages.

They aren’t supposed to bring such things to school — cellphones, iPods, gameboys — but teachers discover the same thing parents discover: adolescents are such demonic pests when they are bored, you will sometimes give them anything they want just to make them shut up and go away.

So occasionally, such as when they’ve been remarkably compliant during a week’s marathon stretch of standardized tests, I give in. It’s five minutes till the bell on Friday, and iPods are discreetly appearing all over the room. Fine. I don’t care. All I want in the world right now is a moment’s peace.

I look up and see a sight that arrests my attention. Around a table are gathered a Korean girl, a boy from Sri Lanka, an Armenian girl, a tiny Pakistani girl, and a Mexican boy. They all have their heads together and are straining to hear the music emanating from the earphones of an iPod.

Coming to the table, I ask “What are you listening to?” The Armenian girl, grinning broadly at having piqued adult interest, brandishes a CD case featuring a young American man in hip-hop mode, his ball cap sideways, his clothes appropriately both designer and baggy.

I hate hip-hop. But I pause. Look at this group, their heads together, all listening… a poster-child gathering of international students enjoying the rhythmic chantings of some callow, corporate-sponsored white surburban boy posing as a dangerous inner-city thug. It’s so L.A. And it’s peaceful! ‘Til the bell rings.

The end is near: we have bred a generation of children who are learning everything backwards. Today I experienced the sudden and terrifying epiphany that we are in the grip of a paradigm shift, and it all started with a smiley-face.

I have a whiteboard in my classroom, and for some reason there is nothing 12 year olds delight in more than drawing smiley-faces on my whiteboard during nutrition. But they don’t draw normal smiley-faces anymore. They draw this, only rightside up:

It took me a moment of blank staring to realize the significance of this: they don’t realize that the computer symbol is supposed to look like a smiley-face. They think a smiley-face is supposed to look like a computer symbol. I started to hyperventilate.

My next indication of impending doom was a half hour later, when trying to explain to a child that you couldn’t just put a quotation mark at the beginning of the quote. You had to put a closing one on the end too. She didn’t get it, and didn’t get it, and didn’t get it, until the boy next to her explained that it’s “like html tags”. If you put one at the beginning, you have to put one at the end.

“Oh!!”, she said in realization, and I grew dizzy remembering that, when I was learning rudimentary html, it was explained to me as being like quotation marks or parentheses.

The final blow, some time after lunch, was when one of my Russian girls, shocked at something her friend had said, uttered the letters “OMG!”

No, she didn’t say “Oh my God!” She said “Oh Em Gee!” Like she thinks that’s actually the saying. Like we have some word, owemgee, and you spell it… I fell into my chair, eyes glazed.

I am not entirely sure I’ll be able to get out of bed tomorrow. OMG. =(

“I can’t party; my camera’s broken!”

Partying in L.A. absolutely requires a digital camera nowadays. As far as I can tell, young people here do not party for the fun of it anymore. They party so they can take numerous pictures of themselves and their drunken friends. They then stagger home and, still tanked, download the photos so they can update their MySpace page.

This is the new essential partying: that which requires voyeurs to make the experience complete. It’s not enough to have fun. Others, unknown but surely envious, must be imagined perusing your debauchery the next morning. What fun is it to dance on the table at some Weho club, or drunkenly lose your bikini top in the swimming pool at the Standard, if you cannot pretend to be embarrassed tomorrow when the pictures hit your best friend’s MySpace page, and you’re the Britney Spears of your little set?

In the spirit of reciprocity, remember that you must also upload pictures of your best girlfriends having a riproaring good time. Pictures of them kissing strange men are okay, but pictures of them kissing each other are far more desirable for the fascinated onlookers who must surely come to stare on the morrow.

But that’s not all. Photos require captions, and you mustn’t be too articulate or they’ll know that really, you’re a dweeb.

Yo! mo hos!!
U wan2B me!
Me & my homegurl

Los Angeles feeds on celebrity, and celebrities need scandal. But with MySpace and a digital camera, you too can be scandalous. You can be the object of interest. U Can B a MySpace star. And if your friend uploads a truly unflattering picture of you, remember: It’s not Bitch!! anymore. It’s biatch!!

A Google search for Thomas Jefferson and the phrase “education of women” reveals that our distinguished Founding Father had little use for reading novels. In an 1818 letter to Nathaniel Burwell, Jefferson writes:

“When this poison infects the mind, it destroys its tone and revolts it against wholesome reading. Reason and fact, plain and unadorned, are rejected. Nothing can engage attention unless dressed in all the figments of fancy… The result is a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life.”

Jefferson makes some exception for “useful vehicles of a sound morality.” But he refers to the rest as “this mass of trash.”

That was 200 years ago. As a teacher in L.A. today, I am desperate to get students to read. Children today seem to despise the printed word, and their attention can hardly be captured by anything that does not writhe, scream, or bleed. Like Madonna’s character in A League of Their Own, I am ready to hand out the trashiest novels I can legally distribute if the phrase “her milky breast” can lure todays’ jaded adolescent into deciphering a few lines of code.

I am, in fact, so despairing of modern youth’s hatred for reading, I have a policy in my classroom: if you are not working, but you are reading a substantial book, I will pretend not to notice. Today I caught a young man with the 7th Harry Potter book tucked surreptitiously in his lap. I was dazzled. It’s not Gameboy, it’s not an iPod, it’s… dare I believe… it’s a book?? He may well end up with a bloated imagination and sickly judgment, but this is L.A. Everyone I meet is like that. This kid will at least be able to READ. And in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.

Florence King, the curmudgeonly writer for National Review, once commented that in her youth, Episcopalians were nicknamed Piscops. I have heard that Irish Catholics and Protestants refer to each other, not very affectionately, as Papists and Proddies. And if you are Jewish, of course, you’ve heard it all. The latest demonizing label is Zionist.

It is evident that religious groups often garner nicknames, particularly those groups we have to endure on a daily basis.

So WHY is there no nickname (that I’ve heard) for Scientologists? If ever there was a group just aching for a nickname, by L.Ron it’s them. I live right next to their Mecca: the Celebrity Center in Hollywood. I see them every day. In my building, we gather at the windows like cats and watch them sprint around the block in their various uniforms: white shirts, black bottoms for dress, blue for heavier labor.

Scientologists are not low profile in Hollywood, particularly during their yearly shindig, wherein they hammer, trundle, and construct for weeks before they decimate the parking situation to have their big, loud hoedown. By the time it’s over, the whole neighborhood is foaming at the mouth. So why do we have no nicknames for them?

Perhaps it’s because they’re pretty nice one on one, from what I’ve seen. They never try to recruit us neighbors (possibly able to tell at a glance that we’re broke.) They keep their grounds looking excellent, so the neighborhood stays fairly pretty. And Kenny, the security guard, has helped me look for many a missing cat. He’s nice. I like Kenny. I’ll miss him when the Mother Ship comes to take him away. Meanwhile, however, I’ll be working on a nickname for them. Cruisers? Thetanists? Ooo, I like Thetanists. It sounds like Satanist with a lisp. Perfect.