“You have a good vocabulary,” the man said to my youngest daughter. Lauren responded, “My father is the Master of the Language.” The man’s sarcastic rejoinder was, “Self-described?” Lauren’s reply was to the effect that her father could back up the boast.
When I was an artist for an electrical contractor at the ill-fated Marble Hill nuclear power plant, I worked closely with a personnel recruiter and a technical writer. The latter would often discuss ideas for verbiage for the manuals he worked on. But many of the people (mostly men) who worked in the containment buildings were less than conversationally adept. When someone shouted “How ya doin’” to me, I replied “Superbly!” If the query was “How are ya,” my reply was “Superb.” I once overheard a coworker muttering, “Superb. That must mean CJ is near.” The man to whom I reported was an electrician from Woods Hole, Massachusetts who liked to claim that should I come to his town, I would be lynched. When he poked fun at my pronunciation of a word, I responded, “I am the Master of the Language. Any error I might make will become a part of the popular lexicon.” He stared at me, shifted his tool belt, and walked away.
The “good vocabulary” incident (which can be decoded by most African-Americans) was not the first time that Lauren’s co-workers have commented on her use of English. At one job, a supervisor told her that he would order a copy of a grammar program for her and a co-worker as an aid to help them in their communications with vendors and supervisors. Lauren declined the offer, citing the “MOL” she grew up with. But Lauren usually works with a rough crew of mostly men, and she can match them crudity for crudity. When Lauren lived with me in St. Louis, Missouri, I enrolled her and her brother in a daycare center near my job. The language of some in St. Louis is unique: “where” is pronounced “were,” and “here” is pronounced “her.” Lauren started to mimic that language and when I asked her why she was pronouncing her words in that way, she responded, “My friends speak that way.” I suggested that her friends could speak as she does.
Code switching is about using language in a way that works with the situations we encounter, or the groups with which we engage. My mother was a nurse in the pediatric ER of a hospital in Pittsburgh. She once told me that part of her job was to whisper in the ears of children the terms they understood. When the doctor asked the child if they had “urinated,” my mom would whisper, “Did you pee?” If the doctor mentioned “bowel movement” my mom whispered, “poop.” When my youngest daughter asked her friend, “Where you at?” she was using a language construction that was particular to her audience. Though I chastised her for it, I was unable to eliminate it. She alternates between the language of a professional office and the language of a raucous warehouse, or the containment towers of a nuclear power plant. I can code switch, but I choose to not let anyone co-opt my language. Unless, of course, there should be some unique profanities I can apply. I will be profane, though I am cautious about the audience. In the poolrooms my language is genteel; in the boardrooms, I code switch to raucous. And when I ask my 3-year-old granddaughter if she has moved her bowels, she understands it as if her mother had asked her, “Did you poop?”
cjon3acd@att.net