Languages in LA

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. =(

When I first came to L.A., I was struck by how many people would say “my bad” instead of “excuse me” or “I’m sorry” or “oops”. I confess, I’ve never liked it.

It seems too blithe, too easy, too short. It’s almost flippant to hear adults using a phrase that sounds so infantile. The word “bad” is so basic, it’s one of the first words babies learn. Even dogs understand a stern “Baaaad!!” It’s on the Swadesh word list, for Pete’s sake. It has even less distinctiveness than “nice”, as in “Oh, that’s nice, dear.”

There’s also an observable lack of actual apology or regret attached to the phrase. It really does not mean “I feel bad about this, I should not have done it, I am sorry”. It just means, “Yeah, I screwed up”. It’s acknowledgment, and little else.

“My bad” is no more attractive coming from children than it is from adults. My students use it constantly. You didn’t do your homework? “My bad”. You lost your pen? “My bad”. You were swinging your padlock around on the knotted end of your gym shirt and you whacked Min Sun on the face with it, and now she’s bleeding and crying in the nurse’s office? “My bad”.

There’s a real lack of any sense of perspective when you can use the same phrase to excuse ‘lost-my-pencil’ as you use to excuse ‘incapacitated-the-best-student-in-the-class’.

I am about ready to start snarling at anyone who says “my bad”. I will be glad when it becomes uncool, probably somewhere around November of 2009. I only hope nothing even more flippant replaces it. I can just imagine someone slamming into my car at that evil intersection at Hillhurst and Sunset before shrugging and offering, by way of apology, “Yep, that was me”.

My students, who are largely Hispanic, have an odd habit of not using the word “ask”. They don’t want to say it, and will perform bizarre circumlocutions to avoid it. At first I thought they were simply being rude. After all, it can sound quite accusatory when I tell a student that he needs to be taking notes, only to have him point at his friend and reply, “I told him can I have a pencil!”.

But this amusing oddity could get a child in trouble when I choose a volunteer to pass out the workbooks and an unchosen one wails, “I said can I do it!!”

Oh, you said, did you? You told me, did you (hands on hips)? Finally it occurred to me, since they are mostly ESL students, that they didn’t realize that the word is “ask”. Trying to get them to say it, however, produced a bit of a struggle.

“You mean, you asked me if you could pass out the books?”
“Yeah, I said could I do it when I came in, remember?”
“Yes… you ASKED if you could do it.”
“Yeah, I said!”
“SAY ASKED!”

Reluctantly, they mutter, “I ASKED can I do it.” For a while I wondered if it was just the difficulty of the SKT sound in “asked”, so finally I went to one of the Hispanic teachers. He mulled it over and finally opined that in Spanish, they would use the equivalent of “said” or “told” more often than they would “preguntar” or “pedir” (to ask.) So apparently it’s just a direct translation phenomenon.

Well, I can’t fault them for that. Direct translation has gotten many people in trouble. It once caused JFK, in Berlin, to accidentally say he was a jelly donut. Let that be a warning to us all.