TKOG Who doesn’t talk the talk

NTKOG #161: The kind of prim, gaggingly normal conversationalist who makes no mention of rummy coves, says “fuck” when she thinks “frig,” and does not preface every sentence by hailing imaginary dudes.

I am: a machine that turns air into slang.

I am not: defending this decision. It has at times cost me the good judgment of strangers, the approval of my elders and even career opportunities. But, I mean, dude.

The Scene: The Broca’s Area in my red-hot cerebellum, which is engaged in the non-stop techno pulsings that make me — if you hadn’t noticed — talk like a cross between a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle and T-Rex. Something reptilian, at any rate.

Secret, guys? The way I write in this blog is pretty much precisely the way I talk. I sneeze out these posts stream-of-consciousness, so every “like” and “dude” and mawkish spot of amateur poetics? Just like they’re found in nature. (The way I write this blog is also, ironically, not the way I write, although I suppose the sheer volume of my archives makes a pretty good bid at debunking that claim.)

But for one week back in March, I struck every questionable specimen from my linguistic collection. Not only my she-bro surfer slang (dude!), but my occasional Elizabethan staples (for-friggin’-sooth) and all the acronyms I use in real life that people only pretend to understand. And my ongoing (imaginary) tea-time banter with Sir Wodehouse? Dash it all!

The mildness of the results was disheartening to say the least. At work, I’d comport myself primly with irate customers, then, swinging into Co-Worker’s cube, bite back my usual “Frig those beezies, Chief” and instead continue in the same well-modulated tone: “That was such a frustrating phone call.” But where’s the sizzle to the thing?!

Every strained utterance became an endless monologue. On the phone with Sister, where once a piquant duuude might have sufficed, instead I was forced to soliloquize: “How exciting!” Who has time for all those syllables? The literal meaning without the emotional undercurrent? I was poaching to death in the blandest of broths.

One day, late in the experiment, Co-Worker went so far as to ask whether I was sad about something. Dude, kind of. For a whole week, I’d disappeared into the general murmur. And while I’m sure, at my job and in my personal conversations, I came off as more professional and perhaps a bit more interested in other people, I missed having people react to me. No laughter, no eye-widened “come again?”s, no appraising smirks in line at the bagel place. I felt like Lady Gaga on a day she’d accidentally remembered to wear pants out of the house. I was nobody.

The Verdict: See, Mom? I really can talk like a proper lady every once in a while. And after this experiment, I concede that I possibly should have scaled back on my lexical finger-painting while I was running rounds of job interviews last fall. People do seem to respond more comfortably to conventionally articulate speech. But it’s like Shakespeare said. To thine own self, y’know, like, whatever.

Tagged as: even writing about talking like a normal dude made me physically itchy guys, i also have many thoughts about the role of slang in the established literary canon but will withhold these thoughts so as not to bore you, interview skills, it's not that i'm DISinterested in other people, language, linguistics, maybe like a character in the live-action super mario brothers movie?, professionalism, slang, sometimes i think about doing a whole NTKOG based around pretending to be a normal person but the thought of it EXHAUSTS ME, speaking of interwar british stuff: i'm currently reading "vile bodies" by evelyn waugh and think you should too, work