Mother Tongue?

It’s been just over fifteen years since I moved back to the U.S. from England (and previously Spain). It’s hard to remember the sense of dislocation—primarily linguistic—that I know I felt at the time. Within two weeks of my arrival, though, I had picked up Paul Fussell’s Class which provided a crash course in decoding the quite complex but often ignored American class system.

A clerical job with an architectural firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, immersed me in the world of young, hip Tufts-educated musicians needing a day job and slightly older and more sophisticated urban architects—and the American English they spoke. Within a few weeks I had learned the correct usage of the words “like” and “totally” in addition to being able to quote Harvard architecture guru Jorge Silvetti (“Jess, but it is very very ogly”).

My mother, a Philadelphia native, returned to American shores from Spain a few years later with my father. Unlike me, she did not have exposure to the rapid office banter of my young colleagues. Life in Bodega Bay was much less edgy, but her re-entry into the American linguistic arena has consequently taken a lot longer and been fraught with perplexing neologisms and, worse, re-introduced words and expressions.

During our recent trip to Bodega Bay she showed us her ongoing lexicon: a notebook with strange, unfamiliar, and interesting uses of American English with which she is able to navigate this morphing of her mother tongue. She subsequently shared her discovery of the online version of this: Wordspy. Today’s word: Upshifter. I suspect she will politely decline.