Aiya from Toronto, Canada, finds that whenever he moves to a new location, he adopts some of the local dialect, which feels a bit uncomfortable. At one point, for example, he found himself unable to recall if he used on accident or by accident to refer to something that happened accidentally. It’s natural to pick up some of the lingo of those around you, so no need to overthink it. In the case of the phrases on accident versus and by accident, though, something very interesting is going on. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Forgetting Your Own Idiolect”
Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.
This is Aya from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Aya, welcome to the show.
How can we help you?
Well, the two of you have said before on the show that you’re just horrible examples of your own regional dialect.
On account of you studying language and hearing new phrases and trying them out and all that.
So I want to talk to you about that and how it happened.
Okay, yeah, sure.
Okay.
I went to college in New England.
When you get that many young people with different backgrounds together, like Connecticut, Boston, New York, California, the South, other countries and all that, they start talking about their own regional dialect of English, you know, Rotary, Roundabout, Traffic Circle.
Oh, you call it pop? I call it soda.
Time and again, I would see people get sort of lost in these conversations.
They’d be listening to people argue about, like, caramel versus caramel.
And then they would look up, confused, and say, wait, what do I say?
This happened to me once with the phrase by accident and on accident, and I simply never got it back.
Ever since then, I feel uncomfortable using either turn of phrase.
I don’t know.
They feel like I’m speaking a different language, whether I use either one of them.
What did you originally say?
I think after a while, I figured out by accident was my original way of saying it.
But it just felt like I was using someone else’s regional dialect.
Like, oh, like I heard someone else say and go, oh, I’ll try that.
Does this kind of thing sound familiar to you?
Yeah.
Do you have any advice for me?
Yeah, it’s like clothes that don’t quite fit, right?
Yeah.
In my house, I do a lot of the laundry, and my son is growing so fast that some of his shirts, his T-shirts, for example, are very similar in size to my wife’s T-shirts because he wears them a little large.
And so I frequently accidentally put his shirts in her pile, and they both think that it’s a joke and that I’m funny for not figuring this out.
But the language stuff reminds me completely of that.
They both know in their hearts that shirt isn’t right for whoever.
They just know.
They can just look at it, and I have to look.
I don’t know.
The tag’s been missing for years.
I don’t know whose shirt this is.
But I get what you’re saying.
The solution I ended up doing, kind of, is I just sort of gave up on both and came up with my own third thing.
I’ve been saying a four accident ever since.
Oh, really?
Is it a joke?
Does everyone get that you’re kind of teasing a little bit?
Kind of.
I just started putting just any and all prepositions instead of those things, like a for accident, above or below accident.
I recently started doing through accident.
That one sort of makes sense.
You might just try the adverb accidentally.
I was going to say.
But I get the goof is fun, too.
Goofing around with the prepositions in that way is fun.
Yeah, we should probably say that there is a generational divide between people who say on accident and by accident.
If you’re born before 1990 or so, you tend to say by accident.
But there’s a whole younger generation coming up that says on accident, maybe a confusion with on purpose.
I still say by accident.
On accident bothers me less and less.
Yeah, I want to go back to that notion that it so bothers you, you’re not sure which is native to you.
And I would argue that they are now both native to you.
And maybe it’s a question of choice rather than a question of fit.
If that makes sense. When we look at what happens to the language of people as they get older,
In every decade that’s been measured by linguists all the way up into the 90s,
People do adjust their own language to suit the circumstances around them. And those adjustments are often permanent.
And it’s not just vocabulary, but can be all parts of the language, including syntax.
And so it is normal for you to adopt the language of the people around you and is normal for it to have a transition phase where at first it feels strange and then it feels normal and then you wonder why you ever were bothered by it and then after that you’ll forget that you ever learned it and won’t remember the day that you learned it sometimes with language you just have to gut it out and not overthink it.
Yeah, I thank you so much for call we really appreciate there’s a lot to chew on here.
All right, thank you.
All right, take care.
Thanks, bye-bye.
All right, so you’re youre changing language is a reflection of what’s happening inside of you as well as around you it’s a normal thing.
Yeah, that’s a that’s a cool thing to think about.
i I guess I tend to celebrate that just being.
Yeah, it sounds like he was on that track too long long long salad bar the linguistic salad bar and I just want something from every little.
I have seen you quiz cab drivers and other people.
You were right there with me.
Sometimes when we do this show, I’m like, Martha, you cannot stay on the phone with this Brazilian person another minute longer.
They are not going to tell you everything about Brazilian Portuguese that you want to know in the time that we have.
But it’s the sexiest language on the planet.
