I made a list – so that you all know the various places where I am conscious that I have adopted various, for the topic of this post, spoken mannerisms.
- “OH WELL” and other capitalizations comes from dinosaur comics
- “Dude” took firm root in my everyday grammar over the months of exposure to Nasa‘s msn username, which featured “Dude”.
- The occasional habit of saying something, then suffixing a “, right?” to the end comes from my GR lecturer; I remember him saying it once in class and it somehow found its way into my mind.
- “*heh*” comes, in a round about way, from my brief spot roleplaying on white-wolf.com, where actions are enclosed in asterisks – but then I started just enclosing everything in asterisks, but then restricted myself back down to interjections.
- I consciously adopted repeating words in my salutations (“gooddaygoodday” etc) because Hamlet did it, and I thought that Hamlet was pretty cool. I know lots of people do it, but they don’t do it because Hamlet did it.
- While this isn’t a spoken thing: I was also deeply impressed by a technique of Rechy – who capitalizes catchphrases or buzzword – lots of other people do it, but reading his stuff was the first time it really made an impression. For instance, capitalizing is the Next Big Thing, you know?
- I also was infected with a bit of gamer-inflection when I was in first year – the way they speak when they’re listing out their stats lists – and that’s come back to haunt me a few times.
- Serge Lang died a few weeks ago, I thought that was pretty sad; he wrote so many books. However, upon reading his obituaries (I’ve taken to reading obituaries recently), I was told that he had no tolerance for bullshit whatsoever. I found myself hammering into Ray today about his opinion of a film, and I had the nagging feeling I was influenced by people’s accounts of Lang. I’m not, like, proud of it or flaunting it, but it is something I noticed that I can trace back to him.
- I’ve noticed myself saying “just” a lot; as in: in the context of “oh, so do you do X or do you just do Y”. And I can’t help but feel that it is a Bad Thing. Because invariably the answer is Y. Alas.
Anyone else conscious of certain mannerisms they have whose source they are aware of?
postscript: I know I’ve written this up before, but it’s not in the archives of this site, so I figure why not put it up again. I’ll probably update it as I remember more and more of the sources of my habits.