When I moved to California twelve years ago (really?! where did they go?), I clearly remember being struck by a colloquialism that fell strangely upon my ears. I don't know if I can do it justice in writing, it's more effectively conveyed in spoken form. But I'll try.
I was new in these parts, having moved from a two year, post-collegiate stint in the nation's Capitol. Suffice it to say that hearing strange diction was a regular feature of my tenure there, seeing as I worked for a Japanese ministry in an office with only myself and several Japanese men (yeah--good times). For a good part of the day I listened to their rapid, incomprehensible banter, only occasionally able to pick out words and phrases from my barely-conversational knowledge of their language.
But the local lexicon, wildly colored by an international citizenry, was just as fraught with creative variations on my mother tongue. I've forgotten a lot of it now, but probably the most common, and now most clichéd, was the omission of the plural 's' after the word "cent." I thought absolutely nothing of transacting with cash currency and having the taker of my money tell me that the grand total of my purchases was "four dollar, twenty-seven cent." Of course this verbal quirk was ushered into the international spotlight by none other than the riddled-but-still-rhyming 50 Cent. I've often wondered why a man sporting so much bling would pauperize himself in name, especially when his friends see fit to swagger on a hundred thousand trillion.
Anyway, I moved to California. In the course of a casual get-to-know-you conversation with a sweet girl at my new employer, I noticed that she punctuated her questions/sentences with an odd form of "huh." It wasn't quite a statement, but it also wasn't quite a question. It was a quatement. It went something like this:
"Yeah, the people back east are really different, huh!....?"
Being the word nerd that I am, I confess to a disproportionate amount of fascination and/or time wasted noticing/thinking about this common-usage hybridization. Much of it hinges on the proper intonation, and as I said, it's tricky to convey in the written dimension. At first I thought it was just this girl, and I admit that in a hugely Seinfeldian way, I would engage her in conversation just to study it. But I quickly learned that it was not an individual idiosyncrasy at all--it was linguistically endemic.
I observed it. But I vowed I would never use it.
Fast forward, oh, six or seven years, and there I was, making quatements of my own: "That was a gnarly yoga class, huh!..?" Oh yes, my friends, not only did I adopt the quatement, I adopted the gnarly and the rad on top of it. The very foundations of my ivied brick institution of higher learning surely quake at the notion, while bespectacled poets and linguists pull pressed pocket squares from their tweeds and weep: She was an ENGLISH major, for Christ's sake. Where-- Oh! wherever did we fail?
Chill, my people--unsniff your crinkled noses and tuck away your tissues. Phonemes, morphemes, and the bending, twisting and creative combining of words are still the domains of my geekery. If wordplay is a sport then I am both an ardent spectator and a willing (if feeble) participant.
I've noticed, lately, that my beloved old quatement seems to be waning in favor of a new one. The new one is slightly more confident and emphatic in it's delivery, it's intonation more staccato. It is more exclamation than statement, but retains that prevailing intention of a question. It is therefore more a quexclamation than a quatement.
The apparent progeny (paternity tests have not been issued) of "Huh!...?" is "Right?...!" I started noticing this a few years back, strangely--and perhaps not accurately--around Los Angeles. An acquaintance of mine routinely peppered his speech with it, and as I did the first time around, I hung the habit on him as if it was exclusively his. Then I noticed a salesgirl in Los Angeles responded to everything I said with the single-word usage:
Me: Wow. This bracelet is so pretty.
Her: Right?...! We got two in yesterday and already sold one this morning.
And guess what I overheard myself saying last night as I led twenty-or-so students through an intense, sweaty (read: gnarly) yoga practice? You got it:
Me: The floor is slippery... right?...! So slide your hand off towards the center of the room.
This time I didn't even pause or resist before I jumped on board. I think this might mean that I consider myself a real Californian now--but with a Midwestern upbringing by parents from New York. I suppose this makes me a wholesome sensitive new age hard ass.
There are others I've noticed, too. One is the impersonalization of "talk to you soon." It seems fitting, I guess, as communication does become less and less personal, as text replaces voice-to-voice contact and voicemail, and Twitter's 140 char. limit teaches us all to hyper-abbreviate. Just as the writebyte is the new sound bite, "talk soon" is the new "talk to you soon." This two-word phrase has been texted to me, emailed to me, and even spoken to me, and I've never gotten used to it. It leaves me feeling mildly anxious, like something is missing and I am hanging precariously over a black hole into which perfectly good words are irretrievably sucked. In short: It makes me sad.
Last but not least is the phrase, "I'm just sayin'." I have no idea where this one originated, undoubtedly it burst into the collective conscious simultaneously across millions of movie or television screens. I like this one. I like it. This is a jauntily concise way of saying, "Hey, this is what I think, and I'm going to put it into words. You may or may not agree with me, and that's cool. It's cool, man, we can all think what we want. I just want to put my thoughts out there in a verbal format." Yes indeed, this one suits me fine.
I'm trying to make a point, right?!
Nah. I'm just sayin'.
(Talk soon.)
