"Hot Ham!" Or, How Our Words Matter

My daughter, who is now a tween, has begun listening to the radio at her own volition. I knew this day would come.

We listen to a lot of music in our house, and many different genres. She gravitates toward pop music, likely swayed by her friends. She recently asked me to change the radio while we were driving someplace to a station that we do not have on one of our pre-set buttons. Now, this is no problem for me, because I actually have a very eclectic taste in music, and I like to talk with my kids about the kinds of music they listen to, and what they like and dislike.

While we were listening, we heard "Wildest Dreams" by Taylor Swift and "7 Years" by Lukas Graham, and then Mark Ronson & Bruno Mars's "Uptown Funk." Now, if you know any of these three songs, you might perceive that there is some potentially problematic content for a tween in any of them. So far as I can tell, much of it is flying over her head yet, at the moment, but we are going to keep listening to music together and talking about the lyrical content.

What makes this listening session notable for me was something she pointed out about "Uptown Funk." With a slightly embarrassed look, she stopped singing along and admitted that there is a "bad word" in the lyrics.

She's right.

The Great Language Game

A screengrab from Wictionary.org

I will not pretend to meet the above definition of polyglot in any way. I am effectively monolingual; I only speak English fluently.

After three years of high school Spanish, and opportunities to practice it on service projects and working in a restaurant, I understand most Spanish so long as it's spoken at a slow enough rate, and speak it passably...still thinking in English, translating in my head, speaking haltingly, and certainly making enough errors to cause native speakers to snicker.

I know a smattering of Dutch, mostly because of my cultural heritage. I know how to say the words, but I have no real sense for how to spell them, or grammar, or how to string them together in coherent sentences.

I'm thankful I had a semester of Latin in the 8th grade, because it helps make sense of French and Italian, plus a surprising number of English words with Latin roots.

I had a Korean friend in high school who taught me several phrases in Korean, but I'm afraid to use them, because I don't know what I'm actually saying, and I don't want to wind up accidentally insulting someone's grandmother.