Soaking Up
When I go home to southern Oklahoma, I tend to revert to the dialect of the place. While I usually don’t stay long enough to get sucked into using “fixin’” as a semi-verb, I often come home stretching one syllable words into two and flattening out my “i”s.
Phonetic convergence, I think the textbooks call it. What we’re around and bumping into rubs off on us.
A similar thing happens when I spend some time with my friend who grew up in the Appalachians. I pick up her verbal pace and even some mutual-experience phrasing, though I haven’t yet succumbed to calling underwear “drawls.”
When around my northern people for an extended time, I tend to lose the pronoun after “with,” and when I hang out with my pals in Boston, though it’s never actually happened, I’m tempted to stay until my “r”s begin to fall off.
It’s amazing what we pick up and don’t even know we have it--and thus, cannot put it down.
I published a piece a while back about my mother. In it, I described her as being neither a finger-wager nor a hype-mom, a distinction whose absence I felt described her to a “T.” I found both descriptor terms lying like half-worn clothes in the open cabinets of my mind.
Fast forward several weeks. On a morning walk around the neighborhood, I clicked on a “Kelly Corrigan Wonders” podcast which was a repost of a graduation address she had given a few years ago. Always blown away by the next-doorness of her writing and the way it effortlessly translates to her speech, I was locked in. I vaguely remembered some of her points. A phrase or two felt like forgotten friends. And then she said it: “Think of someone who makes you feel safe and centered and ready. Not a hype man. Not a finger-wagger….”
We have the same brain, I thought! Then I started to panic on my way up the hill. Had I plagiarized without even realizing it?
Those are not super common expressions, and yet they were floating like feathers in my brain. I hadn’t earmarked Kelly’s speech the first time I heard it. I didn’t take notes nor did I re-listen until that walk, months after I had written the blog about my mom, but clearly Kelly’s phrasing stuck in me.
Maybe I borrowed the terms? Maybe they weren’t ever hers to begin with. “There’s nothing new under the sun or moon,” people, especially creators, say all the time.
What’s yours is mine and ours and theirs, I guess. Up to a point. I was once an English teacher.
I don’t like the thin almost invisible line.
I’m not sure if I owe Kelly Corrigan an apology for the “lift” or if she would be honored to know how sticky her words were. Imitation-- especially when it’s not even a thing you’re aware of-- is the sincerest form of flattery, after all.
P.S. She is so good…