Barbara J. Hamby

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Evolving Language

Having been a reader for 75 of my 80 years, and a talker for even longer, I’ve had the opportunity to notice a lot of changes in language. Some of those changes have even found their way into my verses. I’m sure I’ve not noticed exactly when each of the many new usages slipped into popular conversations.

I wonder how many of them are slang and which ones might be considered proper.

I don’t recall when greetings slipped from “Hello” to “Hi” and to the “Hey” more common today. As I remember, we used to call animals with “Hey.” I do remember approximately when I first noticed that “go” and “went” replaced “say” and “said,” as well as how shocked I was when I first heard the attorney I worked for using those verbs in that way.

And I certainly noticed when “like” became such a popular and highly used and misused word. Whether “like” is heard more or less often than the four-letter “f” word so popular in the movies, is not clear. Who can count that high, anyway?

Then there’s “No way,” – “Yes way,” or simply, “Way,” and the congratulatory “Way to go!”

“Dude” formerly referred to a wannabe cowboy, but now is addressed to males and females alike. “Wannabe” is also an interesting word that I don’t remember hearing when I was younger.

My first husband had returned from five years in Germany when I first met him in 1950, and I was shocked when he told me that the German word for shit was commonly used in everyday conversation. I had never heard the English version used here, but maybe I was just sheltered.

  A Moment in Poetry

I stand in the poetry aisle
at the chain bookstore,
absorbing the aura of literati.
A young male voice breaks
the silence. “Like has there like
been like any like discussion
about like putting books like back
in like their right like places?”

“All the time,” the girl
on a ladder drawls. 

So what about putting
words in their right places,
I wonder as I saunter away.