Quote:
Originally Posted by Martian
Language is a reflection of education. Those who use words like retarded or gay in a derogatory sense do so because they have no recourse; they lack the command of the english language to find a suitable alternative.
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It's nice to see someone so self-righteous as to blame ignorance for the use of common colloquialisms or widely-used connotations of words in the "mainstream" usage of the American English language.
Language, while requiring education, is by no means wielded only in a simple, singular fashion by anyone. In fact, you'll find the greater the language skills of an individual, the more likely they are to pick up and subsequently use both the syntax, the idioms, the slang terms, and the pronunciation of other groups as they spend time around them.
As a Caucasian American who learned Spanish from both 6 years of intermediary education, four semesters of university Spanish, and roughly 4 years of working in and around many Hispanic citizens in the Southern United States, I could pass for a native in a conversation from any one of several Latin regions. Or I could walk into a pub in Chicago, pass for a Polack Yankee like most of my mothers family, grammatically and idiom perfect. Or I could go to downtown Houston, the city of both my birth and residence, and fit right in. I can adjust accent and verbiage to simulate any of the four distinct regions of Texas, and converse with Brits rather smoothly, without much in the way of clarification from either end to get through a conversation, though the few Scots I've come across have some interesting methods of telling a story and are quite colorful.
As you point out, the language one uses--while it may depend on the degree of education--is far more a function of environment and acceptable realms of words used. There are words I use in my father's household I don't in my mother's and vice versa. And you can be damned sure my language slips quite a bit more when I'm out at the bar than it does when I'm around my grandmother. As someone that's a pretty staunch intellectual, the ability to "dumb down" my speech and put those around me at ease remains one of my greatest skills, as it allows me to camouflage the greatest of my assets--my mind.