The Idiolect of an Idiot

Like many teenagers my age I have a tendency to use fillers in my sentences, my favourite one being ‘like’ a habit that annoys my parents because it’s not ‘proper.’ Many adults of course would agree with this but I would just like to point out that using ‘umm’ although more proper is just as annoying as using ‘like.’ The language of teenagers I’m sure adults also find confusing, because as creative people we constantly change the meaning of words. For example the word ‘sick’ to someone like my dad would equal the word ‘vomit,’ but to the people of my generation it can also mean ‘good’ and ‘bad’ simultaneously, all depending on the context. As much as I’d like to say that I’m not guilty of using the word ‘sick’ as an adjective, I can’t; after hearing it so many times from so many different people every day words like ‘sick’ and ‘cool’ manages to weave its way into my vocabulary.

There are many words and phrases that my generation uses that I really, really hate to hear; the usage of ‘man’ after every sentence is one of them, along with extremely crude words and many swear words. However just like with the word ‘sick’ I somehow find myself using these words when talking to my peers. When talking to an adult on the other hand, I find myself using bigger vocabularies, using a more formal tone, and try to use language correctly (just like how I am now.) This is probably to do with the fact that I always try to prove to people that although teenagers don’t use the English language correctly most of the time, we actually can, we just choose not to. Whenever answering calls on the house phone I adapt to the tone I use when speaking to an adult, however as the phone conversation goes on I usually start to lose the formal tone and go back to speaking like how I normally do. This is usually when words like ‘cool’ and the sentence fillers come in.

The idiolect of a person is how they talk and how they phrase things, it’s their ‘personal language style.’ Although the way you speak may change when talking to different people, the way you phrase words, and the way you say them doesn't, and because everyone is different our idiolect is too.