This week it's wine from Setúbal, Tumblr (http://sashyenka.tumblr.com), and wondering what all the fuss with kale is all about. Go watch:
Video: Wine O'Clock: Less Than Famous
This week, I talk about why I make videos and do other things despite a lack of fame or a real desire to gain it, I at long last got my harem sweatpants, and more. Go watch:
You're Not Allowed to Say That
Today's post is a little more heady, so if that's not your cup of tea, more funny will come in the form of a Wine O'Clock video soon.
It recently came into my observations that it is often words with little meaning or respectability gather the most cultural cachet. In real terms, this happens when people learn to swear in a language before learning how to speak it more fully. Swearing is perhaps the best example, but there are many others that often involve colloquialisms and idioms. As a native speaker of a language, it often feels wrong in an inexplicable way, to hear foreign speakers with a weaker grasp of the language use colloquialisms or swear a lot. It comes out sounding unnatural, for as much as we wouldn't blink an eye from our own perhaps equally heavy usages of the same words and phrases. We have surely all experienced some form of this, without needing to have spent time abroad in the company of mostly foreign speakers, the one person you know who sort of jarringly inserts fucking into every sentence or gets idioms wrong but with alarming frequency, as if the mental thesaurus were lacking entries for expressing the same things in more clever ways.
The opposite is also true as a learner of a foreign language. In my experience, at least, it feels wrong and unnatural to use perfectly common and acceptable colloquialisms, and I shy away from them as much as possible. In Portugal there are a number of examples, something cool is something fixe, much of something is bué de something, and we shouldn't forget how people curse things. Yet for as much as I speak Portuguese, and most decisively in a European continental way, to the merriment of my mostly Brazilian cohort, I can't bring myself to speak using those terms and expressions, opting to find a different way of forming my thoughts. It feels unnatural for them to be coming out of my mouth just as it is surprising to Portuguese people that an American would be speaking their language with some level of fluency to begin with.
What I've concluded about this is that swearing, colloquialisms, and even most idiomatic expressions—the hallmark features of native speech in knowing how and when to effortlessly use them—carry a certain cultural agency with them that is hard to adopt. Doing so authentically usually involves being somewhere for a very long time, assimilating as thoroughly as possible to a place, like the immigrants to countries that have lived there for a generation or more. The agency that we lack to say the slang word du jour of our peers is the same as recognizing that regardless of how much effort is put into it, your roots are still elsewhere. The words form a cultural boundary that only external forces can overcome. You might be able to talk Saramago or Chaucer, but only with difficulty will it be bué de fucking cool to talk in a way that pretends like you always knew how to say those less important things.
It recently came into my observations that it is often words with little meaning or respectability gather the most cultural cachet. In real terms, this happens when people learn to swear in a language before learning how to speak it more fully. Swearing is perhaps the best example, but there are many others that often involve colloquialisms and idioms. As a native speaker of a language, it often feels wrong in an inexplicable way, to hear foreign speakers with a weaker grasp of the language use colloquialisms or swear a lot. It comes out sounding unnatural, for as much as we wouldn't blink an eye from our own perhaps equally heavy usages of the same words and phrases. We have surely all experienced some form of this, without needing to have spent time abroad in the company of mostly foreign speakers, the one person you know who sort of jarringly inserts fucking into every sentence or gets idioms wrong but with alarming frequency, as if the mental thesaurus were lacking entries for expressing the same things in more clever ways.
The opposite is also true as a learner of a foreign language. In my experience, at least, it feels wrong and unnatural to use perfectly common and acceptable colloquialisms, and I shy away from them as much as possible. In Portugal there are a number of examples, something cool is something fixe, much of something is bué de something, and we shouldn't forget how people curse things. Yet for as much as I speak Portuguese, and most decisively in a European continental way, to the merriment of my mostly Brazilian cohort, I can't bring myself to speak using those terms and expressions, opting to find a different way of forming my thoughts. It feels unnatural for them to be coming out of my mouth just as it is surprising to Portuguese people that an American would be speaking their language with some level of fluency to begin with.
What I've concluded about this is that swearing, colloquialisms, and even most idiomatic expressions—the hallmark features of native speech in knowing how and when to effortlessly use them—carry a certain cultural agency with them that is hard to adopt. Doing so authentically usually involves being somewhere for a very long time, assimilating as thoroughly as possible to a place, like the immigrants to countries that have lived there for a generation or more. The agency that we lack to say the slang word du jour of our peers is the same as recognizing that regardless of how much effort is put into it, your roots are still elsewhere. The words form a cultural boundary that only external forces can overcome. You might be able to talk Saramago or Chaucer, but only with difficulty will it be bué de fucking cool to talk in a way that pretends like you always knew how to say those less important things.