Essay on Nyack language

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“You start out every sentence with ‘yo’”, Jane said half joking, half appalled. “I don’t know how you expect anyone to take you seriously.”
“I don’t know, it’s natural,” I defended. “It’s not like this is a classroom or anything.”
Jane and I were lying in the grass outside of a towering cement building on the campus of University of Wisconsin-Madison. We were out on lunch from the Tamil classes we were taking to prepare us for our upcoming year abroad in India. Although we were both white, upper class Americans, somehow we were different. I didn’t get any of her classic rock references, I hadn’t seen any of the movies she mentioned and, more than anything, we almost spoke different languages.
Nyack, the town I come from, is a place where creativity is encouraged. Sure, the school can’t pass budgets with sufficient funding for the arts, but what Nyack lacks formally, it makes up informally. Composed of large parts Haitian, African American, Hispanic, Asian and White, Nyack is extremely racially diverse. What sets it apart, however, is it’s diversity in the often unseen categories. Nyack contains the richest of the rich, who live in historic chateaus overlooking the river. Meanwhile, a couple of blocks away, crowded tenements rise from the cracked cement sidewalk. Groups of artists meet downtown in the trendy Art café and Didier Dumas Patisserie, yet on the other side of Hook Mountain there resides a band of fire fighters and police, as separated ideologically as they are physically.
The result of this mixing has been the creation of a pliable Nyack dialect. Hip hop, skater culture, Creole, and Spanish have all been organically incorporated into the language. While not playing equally as pervasive a role in everyone’s lives, no one from Nyack could escape its influence.
From a young age, my brother was known to his peers as the “smart kid”; I remember seeing him reading Herodotus as a second grader. He is now an antiquities major at Kings College in London, speaks fluent Greek and ancient Greek, and scored almost perfectly on the SAT. But even someone such as him has been affected by the Nyack language. He’ll say things like, “Socrates kilt it when he backed the oligarchs” or “Anaximander is the illest philosopher.” He is from my academic family and as smart as they come, yet it is natural for him to mix formality with informality.
When a friend from Nyack visited me at Ithaca College my freshman year, he found a way to fit spicy into nearly every sentence. For example, he would say something like, “I was stopping at the gas station on the way over here and these two spicy girls came out of their car…”, or “Anna and I were spicing in my room when I heard my mom’s door open and she…” Of course I had never heard “spicy” used in such ways before, but from him, it fit.
Over the summer, my closest friends began using the phrase “heads” in the place of all pronouns. “Yo, heads is hungry,” probably meant “I am hungry” and “heads is nice” could be understood to refer to Kobe Bryant if he had just dunked the ball on television. But at times the meaning became blurry. Does “heads need to take out the trash” mean “I need to take out the trash” or “you need to take out the trash?” I understand why people see the way I speak as convoluted, unnecessary, and slightly laughable. But seen another way, it is also, fun, creative, and friendship affirming.
The summer in Madison with Jane was the first time that I had entered a social situation and been disliked. It was also the first time that I had been chastised for the way I spoke. Rather than subtly adopting my words, as had always happened before, Jane and the rest of my classmates scorned me. They did not see me as creative or interesting, but instead took me to be weird and unintelligent. They told me that the way I spoke bothered them, yet I didn’t change, refusing to come into line with the group. This is one of the few times where I consciously made a stand about my language, resolutely clinging to my speech patterns. They must accept me for who I am, I thought to myself, not quite able to articulate what that really meant.
Real problems arise when this quasi language is taken out of the bubble within which it was created. How could someone have any clue that “heads” means “me”? Why should I have any reason to assume that the person I am talking to will get that “I spiced that test” is a good thing? Or, getting back to Jane’s point, how can I expect anyone to take me seriously if I am constantly babbling out goofy sounding words?
I noticed how I conspicuously switch my manner of speech in a moment of clarity one day on the bus. I was going up to Cornell to watch The Daily Show with my older brother and his friends. Sitting nearly alone in the bus (only an old lady with a brown paper bag of groceries and the driver provided me company), I sat preparing myself to watch politics with Ian and his friends. Ian and his housemates are above average intelligence even for Cornell students, and whenever around them my Ithaca College - Cornell inferiority complex bubbles up to the surface. As I sat thinking, I caught myself imagining a politics question. In the imagined conversation one of them asked me what I thought about Bush’s new immigration reform proposal. “Well,” I practiced to myself. “Whenever a subject that has the capacity to divide a reasonable multitude of the citizens into contradictory sects that are more opposition oriented than cooperation focused, the debate often degenerates into a politicized, useless, quarrel.” Huh? Is that any better than the alternative, “Shit is doo doo?” My brother’s friends, all nice, accepting, informal people, threatened me. As a defense mechanism, I used blustery language in order to convey an air of intelligence.
Recently, my girlfriend’s parents came up to visit her. They made reservations for us to eat together at a fancy restaurant at 7:30. Much to my dismay, I stumbled in at a little after eight. As I ran from the car in the direction of the restaurant, I noticed the verbal tightening taking place once again. It was not so much that I was intimidated by her parents; they are very good people who like me a lot. Rather, I had just spent the day letting go of all need to sound intelligent, or even human. But, as is often the case with language, it had all been an act.
As I sat at the poker table wearing a navy blue fishing cap with the phrase “Muck on my Nuts” stitched across the front and an outrageous purple and gold button down, I looked like a fool. My ludicrous looks were mirrored by my language. Emiliano and I sat next to each other and spent a large portion of the time whispering reads to each other, but whenever we spoke out loud, we made pains to use as many of our unintelligible phrases as possible. And since Emiliano and I convey so much information in one word exclamations, these were heavily relied upon. The idea was to come off as a buffoon and luckily I didn’t have to put on much of an act.
Yet, despite my best efforts, it wasn’t long before it became clear to the others at the table that I was a strong player. After a white haired man folded to me during a big hand I goaded him by saying, “Wack. That’s wack. How you gonna take me seriously.”
“Oh, I take you seriously,” he replied. “I take you very seriously.”
We use language to convey ideas and thoughts, but language has a power of description far beyond the actual words. You see, the way we choose to speak defines us. It opens doors and shuts them. It labels us and lets us defy classification. By the way we speak, we make a declaration of who we are, who we present ourselves to be.
At the same time, however, the judgments people make based on the way we speak can be limiting. Countless times I have heard people write off all rappers as unintelligent (although I agree a lot of them are), say that the kid speaking in Ebonics is a fool, or joke about the immigrant with an accent.
We are always going to be labeled, but sometimes, try as we might, we are stuck with a label that is out of line with how we view ourselves. It was nearing the end of our year together in India, and Jane and I were reminiscing at the breakfast table about our first impressions of each other.
I said “The pictures of you silly drunk on Facebook made me think you were a party girl. But I now see just how wrong I was.”
Jane rested her chin on her hand and looked towards the far wall. After a couple of seconds she looked at me and said, “I disliked you because I thought you were trying to be black.” My head twitched with surprise. “Yes,” she quickly added “I thought that you were a fake who was trying to be cool by acting black. Then, when I found out you grew up in an all black neighborhood, I understood you better.”
“What?”
“You see, at first I thought you were talking that way as an image thing. Now I see it’s just the way you talk.”
This struck me, for you see, I had moved away from that neighborhood before I even went to middle school. Spending my early childhood as the only white kid no doubt had an effect on me. Yet it was only later, when my family was comfortably settled down on the wealthy side of town, that I began to develop my habits of speech. Had I become acceptable to Jane because she knew me well enough to see beyond my speech, or was I tolerable simply on the basis of a misunderstanding?
Jane, like everyone, was on the lookout for inauthenticity. We feel uncomfortable when we judge people to be acting a certain way not because it feels natural to them, but because they seek to fit an image. Yet we all partake in this image crafting. We create an image of who we want others to see us as, and at the same time hold onto a different representation of ourselves, For you see, the way we choose to express ourselves, whether it is through our language, our fashion, our car, or even our pets, is not us, just the part of ourselves that we put on display. Behind every lisp, hiding in every accent, mixed up in every curse laden phrase, lies a deeper language, if we could only hear it through the noise.

If it removes indentation again, I apologize. I don't know how to copy and paste without it doing that. It is only when I hit post that the margins shift. Once again, feedback is greatly appreciated.---particularly critique.

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Comments

[oldirtydirty]

Fire
Son, shit is fire. Here's what I've noticed since I've been at school- I use some Yackisms, but def not as often as when I'm chillin at home and especially not as often as when I'm chillin with you, Em, and Shane. Remember when we were in Spain? We went OD on the Yackisms, using at least two per sentence. Part of it was being with close friends from the same hometown, but part of it was that we were in a place where most people weren't gonna understand us anyway, so we were free to speak our basterdized yackspeak. I remember Shane sayin he used to drop yack vocab on heads when he was up at Vermont, but I wonder how thick your yack speak would be if you and Emi, and now Shane, had all gone to different schools. I'm not sayin I completely stop talkin like a yackhead when I'm at school, and sometimes my friends even pick up on ish, like refering to a friend as "my boy". It sounded maaad funny when my preppy friend Dave leaned over to me at a party when I had a friend visiting and said, "I like your boy." In yack speak, it would have been prudent to add "no mo", or something along those lines. Anyway, I've noticed that I'll only drop a yack word every once in a while, and definitely not two or three times a sentence when I'm at school. So my question to you is, if you and Em had gone to different schools, do you think you would use the yackilect as often as you do? Holla atcha boy.

[Emily]

This essay was great and I love the comment.