In one way, I am dangerously close to adopting the speech/ writing patterns of other people, and, in another, I already have. Let me contextualize how weird this is by giving my lack of prior history in this:

I grew up in the South. No Southern accent. My parents have Chinese accents. Me, none.

This extends further. Words ranging from "rad" to "excellent" to "phat" to "mad" I never picked up either. I am boringly bland in my speech, with my most slangy word being "cool."¹

Yes. Boring.

My failure to pick up speech patters has always made me feel a little bit alienated, ² to some extent. Because I think to fit in a group, to really fit in, you have to talk like people in that group. Or, in more textually-based circles, to write like people in that group.

I've never been any good at that. The closest I've come to this textual communion is when my friend Andy and I wrote a paper together.³ Our sections fit together seamlessly. When I remarked upon it, he responded, "Yeah, we have the same style: boring academic."

This phenomenon has always made me feel like an observer, rather than a participant. I'm sure that there are psycholinguistic texts about this phenomena of fitting in. I'm sure if I had the barest inkling of who the authorities are on this kind of stuff I would want to cite them.

Even phrases I think are terribly cute, like the way my friend Emily goes "cry cry cry" when she's mocking someone's whining, I don't pick up.

But I'm almost picking up something. There's a certain way that certain people (who coincidentally read what I read) say things that's working its way into my speech. "Read this. <pause> Is my advice." "You and I are going to argue. <pause> Is where this conversation is heading."

This weird little sometimes-unnecessary addendum at the end, with the number not always agreeing with the previous section.⁴ The sentence structure turned around, but not completely.⁵

I'm not sure what to make of this. Why it exists. Why of all the various text patterns I've been exposed to that this is the one that I'm almost picking up. Why a particular group of people do this--all the type of intellectual sorta-pomo young people who read footnoted inbent metafiction, who listen to sampled music, who have a tendency to like Escher and Dali and random underground zine artists. Look at the McSweeneys letters column.⁶ You'll find a lot of this semi-inversion going on.

Your thinking about this. Is what I'd like to hear. ⁷

042000

a. How predictable was that?

2. I'm finally using the word "alienated" correctly. This is a word I hyperextend quite often, using it to touch things that it shouldn't be touching.

3. Let me say this, if I haven't said it already. When everyone's in synch, joint projects are amazing. This is the stuff I live for. Mutual creation.

4. I've never heard the last phrase begin with an "are." It's always "is." There are real linguistic terms for this, I just know it. ^b

b. Discourse community. Is that it?

5. A complete turnaround would be something like "to read this would be my advice" or "an argument between us is where this conversation is heading," rather than here, where the complete sentence is presented first, the incomplete sentence after. The complete turnaround is what several of the authors for my journal have tried to insert, claiming that "it helps break the monotonous order of the article." We student editors often disagree with this, feeling it is inappropriate for the law review context. No, I'm not being defensive at all.

6. It is not the fault of McSweeneys either. Justin did this last summer, awhile before he ever even looked at McSweeneys. I remember noticing it back then, forgetting about it, and later noticing it in a few other people in the same (pseudo?) intellectual community as well.

7. Oh yes, terribly predictable.

Tehshik says: "There are all kinds of people who study dialectology; a speciality is perceptual dialectology, which is how people use shared or unshared speech patterns to decide what they think about one another. E.g., Dennis R. Preston, Perceptual Dialectology; Ellen Bouchard Ryan and Howard Giles (eds.), Attitudes Towards Language Variation."^c

c. MLA style. If only the web did smallcaps, I'd stick everything in Bluebooked law review style.