Do you present yourself differently to different people, or in different situations?
I work in financial services, and my desk in within earshot of two black women. That quote above is an excerp from a conversation between the two which I couldn’t help but overhear. One was pissed that some other woman had served her husband food at a cookout they had attended. Truth be told, the whole exchange was pretty fuckin funny. Who knew women get pissed over such seemingly trivial things. But that’s a whole other thread.
The point of this thread is my observation regarding the manner in which these two professionals speak and communicate with each other. They’re both smart, and polished speakers when addressing professional colleagues… I’ve worked with both for years. But the minute they’re “off duty” they make a choice to revert back to ghetto talk. You had to hear this conversation to believe it.
I was initially perplexed by this behavior until it donned on me that I do the same thing. There’s “work” Stuntman Mike, and “off work” Stuntman Mike. Hell, there’s even a third Mike… that’s “internet” Mike.
Best I can figure is that my work persona is really no different than my work wardrobe. Put on a shirt and tie in the office, take it off when I leave. Speak in a professional manner in the office, talk like an inbred redneck when I leave.
Just curious how widespread this double kid personality trait really is… so, do you present yourself differently to different people, or in different situations? Discuss.
Given your previous threads, I can’t imagine this will fall on anything but deaf ears but for fuck’s sake don’t call Black English ghetto talk. jesus christ. OP would do well to get themselves a copy of John McWhorter’s Talking Back Talking Black. It’s short.
Codeswitching and registers are very familiar linguistic phenomena and have been studied in great detail. The language we use in a given situation is very analogous to clothing actually, where the langauge we use can say a lot about how we want to be perceived in a given situation. Everyone uses different registers throughout their day though it’s not always as dramatic a shift as someone codeswitching from SAE to BE is.
Here’s a short NPR article on some reasons for codeswitching.
It’s honorable to call out wrongness when you see it, but it can also be tedious to the point of distraction.
Code switching is a form of lying. I think people pick up on that.
Ramble hidden for those with better things to do:As a claim adjuster I had to speak mostly with adjusters from other companies, regular folks, and adversarial lawyers. I used to do the code switching thing until my employer began to display a new attitude toward the employees. They didn’t care about us, so why should I care what sort of image I project on their behalf? I just got real. With customers, with rival companies, with attorneys. There was no discernable difference between work me and home me. My professional reputation took off. I started getting what I wanted from people who would normally have resisted me when I presented as polished and professional. And it wasn’t that I was just making friends on the other end of the phone–this was happening with people I hadn’t talked to before. I was getting calls from attorneys who’d start with, “I know this isn’t your case, but I need to know what’s going on and I hear you’re a straight shooter…” My work production shot up. And when it was time to change jobs, the company president welcomed me to the interview with, "So YOU’RE [my real name]? Can I get you something? Beer? Scotch? Heroin? " And I knew I was home.
This is ridiculous. Code switching is a natural part of communication. I speak a different variety of English with my kids, with my parents, with my educators, with my peers, with law enforcement, with the guy next to me at the supermarket, etc. It’s just adjusting for context. No more “lying” than it is when I speak a foreign language. I certainly write here in a different manner than I speak. That’s code switching as well. I mean, I suppose it can be “lying” if you’re really only doing it for effect and pretending to be someone you’re not, but most of us have many facets to our personalities. I don’t feel like I’m “lying” when I speak “educated college” English vs when I’m just speaking my local Chicago dialect.
It is completely appropriate and not dishonest at all to speak and behave differently in different situations. To say otherwise is utter nonsense. I could give a dozen examples off the top of my head, but I’ll only give a couple.
A guy hanging around the locker room after a game is going to behave differently from the same guy at a job interview, or at dinner with Queen Elizabeth, or in bed with his wife (or in bed with Queen Elizabeth, now that I think of it). A woman hanging out with her girlfriends is going to speak and act differently when she’s in church/temple, and when she’s hosting the neighborhood parents at a toddler playdate. People have many facets to them, many vocabularies, even many languages. ALL of them belong to that person, and it is up to the person to use the language, behaviors, vocabulary, gestures, wardrobe, etc. appropriate to any given situation. It is not dishonest or “lying” to make those appropriate choices. Holy crap.
OK, now that we have the code-switching out of the way, I’m calling out this:
Women are not clones or robots, we do not all think the same way. SOME women get pissed over such seemingly trivial things. “Women” in general do not, because some of us couldn’t care less or view it as a welcome break from daily meal prep at home.
It’s rather like SOME men get insanely jealous if another man speaks to/looks at “their” woman. And, indeed, there is an element or echo of that sort of possessiveness in the title sentence with “my man”.
It’s very common for people to switch between dialects, depending on the setting. Those women were almost certainly speaking AAVE (African American Vernacular English), a real dialect of English with its own set of grammatical rules, just like any other dialect. Many Americans, unfortunately, are ignorant of its existence and refer to it with denigrating terms like “ghetto talk”, but this is a real dialect recognized by linguists.
Hawaiian pidgin English is unofficial second language here in Hawaii and the majority of locals break into it in informal situations. It’s not uncommon to speak pidgin between co-workers and formal English to management.
I tend to subconsciously pick up the accent and mannerisms of those I speak to and sometimes do it consciously. For example, instead of saying “yeah, yeah” to acknowledge I’m following what speaker is saying, I’ll switch to “ummm, ummm, ahhhh” if it’s a native Japanese speaker to match their intonations.
Back in the 1990’s I used to work at a cell phone kisok at the military base. It was amazing to be talking to a customer informally, then watch their speech an demeanor completely change when speaking to a superior. I was talking casually to a customer/solider when he received a call on his phone, not only did his speech change, but he automatically stood straight up.
I like the idea that code switching is lying. That means that any time anybody asks me not to swear a fucking blue streak at them and their children, they’re telling me to lie and that makes them immoral, not me! So fuck those fuckers!
Not really buying that the OP works with either “professionals” or “black women,” (my bet is that he’s never met either minorities nor useful work), but would suggest for an enlightened being with the same question that the answer is to respond, to the best of his ability, when (and mostly if) he is spoken to, in the way the last decent person he ever met taught him to speak respectfully to others in his own limited way.
It is a stupid and racist idea that if two people speak in one way to one another, when they have never spoken that way to you, and they understand you and respond in kind when you speak your own stunted, bigoted, brand of language, that you should try to emulate theirs. They have already demonstrated their intellectual superiority and you should just let them come down to your level, rather than cause offense by trying to grunt in theirs without formal lessons.