You Speak Weird

When I was in fourth grade, I heard my first swear word. I had probably heard some before fourth grade, but I never really registered what they were. But in fourth grade, one day, I heard a new word. A group of girls were giggling at lunch, talking about some sort of new Chinese restaurant they had went to over the weekend. They told me the name of the restaurant (I believe it was phuk), and, of course, I repeated it. Then I got in trouble with the teacher.

When you think about it, the concept of swear words is really quite strange. We all know them, we can all spell them and pronounce them, but in polite conversation, you should never use them. In fact, in theory, there's no need for them at all, and most are only used when something doesn't work according to plan. I don't get it.

I once read in a science magazine that some group of scientists with a bit too much time on their hands had calculated that applause follows similar patterns to a dying electromagnetic field. If this is true, then words and phrases must follow similar patterns to a hurricane. 

Let's take the phrase "like so". When I first heard this phrase, it was late 90s, and I was watching Emeril Lagasse on the food network. He was preparing some sort of salmon dish, and he wanted me to add the basil "like so". I remember distinctly being confused by that statement. Like what? Like so that the basil covers the entire fillet? Like so that there's a little left over? Like so delicious? It must have been a typo in the script, I figured. I didn't hear "like so" again until a few weeks later, and Alton Brown (I was a hungry kid) was working on some sort of french toast thing. He had been kind enough to prepare a loaf of already stale bread – like so! Now I was totally bamboozled. He hadn't actually done anything, short of uncovering a plate of stale sourdough. Now things really started picking up. The mythbusters were welding pieces of metal together like so. My teacher wanted me to complete the homework like so. It was ridiculous.

I don't hear "like so" that much any more. But about two or three times a year, I will hear a new phrase, like "kicking around" or "a case of point" or "onto it" pop up, spent a year or two wreaking havoc on my normal speech patterns, then die down and leave nothing but a dependent clause hanging on the end of a student's B- homework assignment.

It's very hard to define what constitutes a "language". English is a language, but it resembles nothing of what it was half a century ago. Today I might use words from German, French, Spanish, and Italian all in the same sentence. The word Muggle is now a legal English word. English is an ever changing language, and it never stops.