The poet Anis Mojgani has said, "Your mouth is a sign of how sacred your life actually is."
I find these words rolling around sarcastically in my head as I sit, near-collapse and rich with morning breath, in my 11a.m. while some girl in a distant corner of the room rambles on, barely teetering on the edge of meaning. Allow me to paraphrase: "Like, what [irrelevant philosopher] is saying, I think, is that, like, people need happiness. Not like they need happiness but, like, they spend their lives sorta looking for it, you know what I mean?"
And the answer is a resounding, "No, I do not know what you mean."
See, you've inflated your possibly correct response with enough qualifiers and unnecessary clauses to confuse Gary Busey. Any conviction you were trying to relay to the rest of the class has abruptly been smothered by the down pillow of your own inarticulation.
I sound angry -- I'm not. I'm frustrated.
Although this situation may be hypothetical, the experience is all too common. This generation (men and women alike) suffers from a unique inability to correctly articulate itself, an utter reluctance to put forth strongly-formed beliefs for fear of being perceived as, like, critical thinkers, or whatever. I see it all over campus.
We weaken ourselves and make ourselves seem less threatening and more acceptable for our vanilla approach to the bigger questions. We play this roundabout game where we can avoid saying anything declarative while still being understood as contributing. Qualifiers such as "like," "sort of," "kind of" and "not really" find their way into our everyday language, making our verbs less absolute, taking the power from our adjectives, and belittling our once-mighty nouns with their circumventive connotations.
Then, there's the interrogative tone; what poet Taylor Mali called the "invisible question marks and parenthetical (you knows?)" that we use to supplement our language, to position ourselves as not entirely committed to what we're saying. These questions are a reaching out; a search for the comfortable affirmation of agreement. We are afraid to disagree with each other, or to be misunderstood, so we cushion our statements with phrases like, "Do you know what I mean?" and "Okay?" We pry for the approval of others, inviting them to hit the "Like This" button on our convictions before we are comfortable laying them down - sort of, anyway.
Some pin the blame on "Valley Girl." Back in 1983, teenagers saw Julie and Loryn spouting nonsensically on the big screen and were quick to imitate their open-mouth gum chewing and dopey lingo. All of a sudden, it was cool to be stupid. Not knowing what you were talking about was all the rage, and those who had the audacity to speak with conviction were met with sassy posture and heavily-mascaraed gazes of disapproval. But that was 16 years ago.
Fast forward and here we are: a generation with an articulation deficiency; rich with potential but absent the vehicle Mojgani named "a sign of how sacred your life actually is." These subversive jests at declaration are so weaved into the way we speak that they become accepted, unnoticed, or taken as commonplace. We are desecrating ourselves.
This problem becomes an epidemic in the Loyola atmosphere. We are tentative; afraid to challenge for fear of being cast as an "other." In a setting where intellectualism carries the stigma of being undesirable, and 4.0s hold less prestige than 40ozs, we purposefully play dumb to appear more aloof; "cooler." It seems childish, but it's the subconscious way we conduct ourselves. However, it is not irreparable. In his poem "Totally Like Whatever, You Know?" Mali asks "What has happened to our conviction?/Where are the limbs out on which we once walked?" He dares the listener to challenge themselves, to "speak with conviction," and I put forth the same challenge to you.
Be conscious not only of what you say, but how you say it. Delete those needless words from your speech and be not afraid to stand on a limb for once. It's not easy, but the reward is fulfillment. Limbs sometimes break, but don't be scared -- it's totally whatever.
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