Colloquialisms and Conversations.

Culture Crash: Language Barrier, or so I thought.

Had I moved instead to, say, Japan, France or Germany, perhaps the notion of a "language barrier" would be more appropriate and expected. Surprisingly, however, there is still some sort of a language barrier here in the United States of America, land of the universal language of English and Bastardized Mexican Language. Given, it's on a much more subtle and cultural level, but one still exists, nonetheless.

Take, for example, this little trifle of a conversation from an after-school-special a while ago. For the sake of anonymity and security, I shall conveniently disguise names into A, B, C, and me, for well, myself. All that you need to know are that A, B and me are guys, and C is a pure, natural, XX-chromosome girl.

Anyway, the topic of our conversation was about childhood scars and all that. suddenly:

A: Oh, I have a lot of scars.
B: Really dude? Show us!
A: Well, it's under my shirt and all...
B: Well, what're they like?
A: *pantomimes clawing himself*
me: What? don't tell me you...
A: *wink wink*
C: *joins the conversation* what?
A: oh, I have scars all over my back. :D
me: oh, all over your back.
A: Yeah. From my girl then *wink wink*
me: OH! I thought you self-mutilated! ha ha! 'cuz you know, you were all *pantomimes clawing at my chest*
A: no, no, no. if it were in front, it would mean "get off of me!" but since it's on the back... well, you know what that means.
C: *bites lip*


Now, I wouldn't call myself the most conservative person ever. I'm way far from that. I'm the kind of person who, despite being anatomically male, somehow gets impregnated by the mere lascivious conversations my friends and I would have. Even more exaggeratedly, I could swear we heard the nuns over at Miriam (do they have any?) and Poveda groan in unison whenever we'd so much as mention their names.

Just kidding.

We may like to make some wanton jokes now and then; and we may even be prone to using colloquialisms liberally (Trust me, Bitch was far from offensive), but still, there were things we kept on a joking realm, or at least on a fictional-if-we-lived-in-a-much-more-liberal-world level. You know, things like commiting murder... or having actual, back-scarring, what-i-assume-to-be bedspring breaking sex. Imagine then my surprise and how taken aback I was when he so openly admitted that fact. And trust me, either it were true, or his sense of fantasy was very vivid indeed, because we got a veeery prtty picture painted for us shortly after, free of charge, without even needing to ask.

It was definitely one of those moments when you could feel your jaw muscles slacken, and when you just want to drop your mouth open out of sheer surprise, and maybe let your tongue droop down a bit, even. But, for the sake of politeness, and to achieve an air of nonchalance, I tried my gosh-darned hardest to keep my mouth shut. Of course, this was not without its own set of give-away repurcussions. Firstly, I'm sure my mouth was in some sort of skewed smile. Secondly, my tongue (which I bit to keep from keeping my mouth from gaping wide open) bled a little, and, dare I say, the blood I tasted only served to keep A's narration even more realistic and vivid.


Thankfully, the topic soon changed after that, since we got to talking about what we wanted for lunch (how we segued from that to lunch is a mystery, though), and I was free to relax my muscles, and let a drop or two of drool dribble (metaphorically of course.) since it's more than acceptable to salivate when faced with the prospect of a delicious lunch.




Not to say that A's story wasn't hot as hell, however.