I once was accepted into a summer program for gifted students by writing my application essay on how I thought Ebonics was detrimental to society. This was a prompt offered to me. I cannot imagine I would have decided to write on this topic if no one told me I should, so the inappropriateness of this should at least partially rest on the shoulders of the adults who guided me.

This was not the least problematic thing I have ever done.

My issues at fifteen were not that black people used this vernacular, because I associated it with the white kids in my high school condescending to and annoying the black ones. I then felt this was not a dialect that naturally developed but a way for Caucasian racists to thumb their noses at the standard English of school while conducting daily minstrel shows for their own entertainment. The top few people in my class were black and they never spoke Ebonics that I was aware.

I was not right, of course, just young and valuing words over people. If I can coo over the grammatical quirks of lolcat and doge now, languages that do not exist, I can hardly stick my nose in the air over a dialect of English people do genuinely speak whose Wikipedia entry is so grammatically and dialectically involved it makes my head spin (though I learned and embrace that the accurate term is "African American Venacular English," which I've liked better since the moment I discovered it). Their culture infuses the rhythm of the dialect, though some call it "bad English" because its grammar does not match what is standard.

Who uses anything approaching standard English all the time? I do not speak the same at home with Amber as I do in my fiction as I do in my nonfiction as I do with new people as I do at work. Each venue of expression demands its own nuance.

At work especially, I code switch to a looser tongue, stating my sincere emphasis with "dead ass," my caution "You're not about that life," my praise offhanded, private and tinged with grinning sarcasm because that is what my students can digest. Anything else would make it harder to reach them. I speak to them a language I have cobbled together for them from how then speak to one another. Not their language - I would sound ridiculous and forced trying to emulate teenagers - but one that reaches them. If I were to drown them in all the words and clever phrases with which I pepper my dialogue when speaking to people with advanced degrees or publications, I would lose them utterly. I have known people who behave as though the only way to bring students to a collegiate level is to sound like the GREs, but my students are not trying to be at the collegiate level. They need to get to the "first year of public high school" level and that is often a goal so distant to them that they imagine it impossible. If I can get them to comprehend and respond by code switching - the same concepts, the same text, the same assignments, but the conversation about it is less formal - I am doing them a disservice by injecting seeming haughtiness.

The goal of any act of communication is, or should be, understanding. The overt and covert may not match, instead telling the subject that the messenger is passive aggressive or arrogant or volatile or prejudiced or any number of sub textual messages. How I comport myself in different situation should be more individualized, but it should likewise be left discrete. I am the same person hoping to convey the same information but tailored for my audience.

When I worked at the Renaissance Faire, I sometimes struggled to lose the dialect, even when I returned to my street clothes and I was eating in a chain restaurant. I had spent twenty hours every weekend forbidden to speak with an Upstate New York accent or contemporary vocabulary and my brain adapted, not wishing to bounce back immediately. In that specific time and place, for pay, that voice was useful. Outside that, it would be anachronistic and, worse, annoying.

I feel the same about the patois required of me to keep my students connected to the lessons I want to teach. I do not want to leak into my daily life this lolling slang with which I barely get away as an adult white man. Like woolen sports coats, it fits my casual wardrobe poorly and I don't care to wear it outside the bounds of its propriety. Its purpose is within my four, grass-milkshake-colored classroom walls in front of boys in red and khaki. I have no need to include the slang before my wife, out with friends, pestering my niblings. It is too crass, too reminiscent of a job from which I need all the distance I can get.

Even outside, in my interactions with non-adjudicated teenagers, no one speaks as my students do. I assume they learn it from their families before they pick it up from the streets. It is a language that has its own structure that is easy to learn, but it has limited utility.

My students do not speak AAVE. I am not certain they would understand if someone spoke it to them. (I guarantee they would immediately call the person a word my lily whiteness will not repeat.) Their language is that of modern teens with an urban spice, words and phrases stolen from mumbled rap, but these do not belong to them. We have not had a city kid here in years, the only ones to whom they would credit AAVE. When they are mocking someone for being unintelligent, they invariably recast their opinions in some variation of AAVE. My students' opinions are distancing and self-hatred, a sort of "Sure, I may be an adjudicated youth, I've committed some major crimes, I like rap, but I'm not like those people. I know how to talk good!"

When I started my job, I was baffled by the students' use of the phrase "feel some type of way," because it seemed they wanted an adult to tell them how they were feeling. I wasn't about to shoulder that burden. I quickly came to understand it was more an expression of how beyond expression they found their feelings. (My students are not creatures of nuance when it comes to emotions in the best of circumstances, to say nothing of this elevated summer camp where some never cease their hypervigilance.) They use this phrase even when they do have the term in hand that they mean. It is easier to rely on inexactitude to protect their egos from admitting the anger of disappointed expectations or the nostalgia for a time before they were in the juvenile justice system. They feel some type of way because the "way" is seen as frail and feminine.

This phrase also signals their linguistic limitation. They do not have the words to express gradation, so they relegate every taste to salt, sweet, or bitter (it is naïve to think they've heard of umami). If they don't know what to call an emotion, how can they understand that they are feeling it? They don't know compassion, so it is only someone weak being suckered. Love is only lust plus possession. They do not know the word agape, let alone a love without demands behind it.

When I was younger, I struggled to make adults understand that I did not speak as I wrote, which was far closer to how I thought. The two acts activated different parts of my brain, as far as I could tell. I had this dam of words, but they did not flow to the same pipes. Writing gave me a half-second more consideration, which was all I really needed to go for articulable to articulate. Now, with the benefit of age, experience, confidence, and practice, the two occur nearly identically, though I can't verbally spin new stories with my eyes open (I also cannot spell difficult words with while looking around the room; it is possible that my visual cortex inhibits me).

There are languages where one does not say left or right, but the cardinal direction, so the people have what I would considered a preternatural ability to always know how to find north. In tongues with more terms for shades, the speakers are capable of artistic levels of color discrimination. In those where green is a sort of blue and white is a kind of yellow, the people do not see these as well because there are no was to properly encode the experience. What we cannot say, we cannot see.

No wonder English is an unrepentant plunderer of other languages, seeking satisfaction for the full gamut of finite human experience from weltschmerz and ennui.

My students call one another the n-word, one of the most loaded and disgusting terms available to them, more than one might hear at a Klan rally scheduled opposite an NAACP meeting. They do this in anger as much as anything else. They internalize that this is what they are, all they are, because they have not learned a better word for someone like them. (Of course, they call one another this almost irrespective of race; they know it is a terrible thing to say to anyone, even if that person is Latino or white.)

Though the explicit goal of how I teach it is to give my students the tools to find and use evidence from a text, the implicit one is to give them the language of business and a more common culture. What they speak among their friends and family is theirs and they can use it as they wish, but our society will put a wall between them and most definitions of success if they cannot speak the right password with the slightest accent possible. One of the best gifts I can impart upon them is code switching and the emotional intelligence to know when to use it. If I can convince them that a more standard English is not "acting white," all the better.

It is not for me to say whether this is fair, though I can entertain the argument that anything that can convey accurately and fully a complex idea to your listener suffices for the purposes of language.

How we speak affect how we think, as has been demonstrated scientifically. How are my thoughts altered by slipping into my students' manner of speech? Does it change the structure of my brain as does musical practice and physical exercise? Languages do, but does their parlance? Will I be less capable of returning to the mind space I consider mine? I do not feel improved by an ability to use their terms accurately, except professionally.

I have known people who began by using contemporary slang in a mocking way, peppering their speech with "hellas" or "on fleeks," then discovering these borrowed phrases became a part of their everyday speech and cannot so easily be dislodged. I don't presume that they are telling their bosses in meetings that they ain't about dat life - most people can still segregate the professional from the personal - but these phrases nestle deep in them. Language has a life of its own. Once you let it through the door, it will piss in the corner to mark this at its territory.

Soon in Xenology: Mummies. The interview.

last watched: Arrested Development
reading: Abduction by John E. Mack
listening: Fiona Apple