Language Investigation One

Throughout our lives my brother and I have been exposed to many different words and phrases which have been brought to us by an eclectic group of family. For reasons that are unknown to my brother and me our mother has always been “hard of hearing” as she always put it and has never been able to correctly pronounce or articulate certain words. These words, mind you, have no relation to one another aside from the fact that our mom cannot pronounce them. So as an alternative to pronouncing the words correctly she simply adapts them to her vocabulary as she sees fit. A stand out example of this is the word calzone. Coming from an Italian up bringing my mother could never say calzone so she substituted cannoli in its place. Now cannoli is a word but it has a different meaning. A calzone is a type of pizza folded before it is cooked to hold a filling. A cannoli is almost the same thing except that it is a dessert instead of a meal. Moving on, my grandparents have always expressed themselves like nobody else in know. Each of them come from the southern United States and are unique in their language. Any time my brother and I were being to loud and obnoxious in she would immediately shout at us to stop “all that hootin and hollerin”. Further when she felt that we were being poor listeners and/or not making smart decisions she would not hesitate to assert that we were “hard headed”. As for my grandfather he would always greet us with the same line “well chief whadda ya got to say fo yo self”. When he would say this my brother and I would always look at each other and try desperately to submit an answer that would show our worth. When he said this to us he was always looking for us to show that we were constantly trying to grow and become well rounded young men. As for our dad, he always had a mix between original and very simple language. Whenever he would talk about the large homeless population in Denver he would always refer to them as “bums”. As for simple and straight forward he would constantly refer to our friends fathers as such and suchs “Ol Man” and he would always refer to our family dog Waylon as “the dog” never calling him by his name. Our dad was constantly upfront about his thoughts and opinions and sometimes crude. During puberty my brother and I each went through a rough patch with acne but it was my dads goal to make us comfortable with it. Each morning we would come down to breakfast if either one of us had an new break outs, dad would immediately point out that we had grown a new headlight over night. With all this my brother and I have turned out fine sometimes coming off a bit too forward with people but all in all our language experiences have given us a good laugh.