Think back to all the time you spent learning SAT vocabulary during your junior and senior years of high school. You may or may not still remember the definitions of words like "abscond" and "subterfuge," despite the fact that you'd likely never use them in real life. The only place that they now seem appropriate is in a paper written to wow a Writing 5 professor or in your senior thesis, or in any of the papers that come in between.
On the other hand, just as those words have vacated the crevasses of your brain, other words have entered to take their place. These words are a little easier to understand and don't challenge you or stress you in the same ways that the SAT lingo did. These words include "boot," "soil," "throw save" and "pull the trigger."
By all means, I appreciate the use of these tasteful words in the appropriate context. When one has had too much to drink and is feeling like he or she might be sick on the walk home, yes, it is only fitting to "pull the trigger and boot." I even appreciate overhearing these words in hushed tones at the Hop the next morning. I just don't appreciate it when they take on such a frequency and lack of variety that interactions become almost standard and go by without any mental effort or presence.
"Hey bro, what's the line like?"
"Two or three. Here, you want a beer in the meantime?" This is just one snapshot of an interaction.
I have a theory on how we all got so dumbed down in terms of language. We came to Dartmouth, and from the moment we were introduced to the fraternity scene, we observed ultra-fratty behavior from the upperclassmen and did the only thing we could to hide our discomfort: made jokes about it. We started incorporating unnecessarily fratty vocabulary into our own lexicon to be ironic and mock that "bro who was booting his face off last night." And we thought we were so funny.
And then October came. And then November. And we were still making the same jokes, not realizing that, to an outside observer, those words and mundane topics had integrated themselves completely into our vocabulary. The jocular tone has entirely
left our speech when we say, "I think I'm just going to hit up [this or that frat] and black out." We have become the very thing we were mocking. Sweet. The result is a seemingly intentional dumbing-down of conversations that occur in basements and that carry over into our everyday lives.
It makes sense for different activities and mindsets to have different vocabulary sets associated with them. But wouldn't it be great if they didn't have different intelligence levels tied to them? What if, in the basement, we used the same variations in sentence structure and word choice that we used in our papers?
Okay, so maybe that idea's a little over the top. I don't want to hear anybody use the word "concordantly" in a social setting. But still, we should stop treating frat basements like Vegas; they are not an oasis in the desert of rules and etiquette. This is not to say that we should take the basement out into the world, but rather put the real world in the basement.
Go ahead. Talk about something interesting. I realize that there are four entire pong games to spectate and comment on. And by all means, if there is a throw save sink, then please comment. However, there are also other things to talk about. Like how we all witnessed the latest campus sports team win (no, but seriously), or maybe even politics? You can come up with your own topic of conversation, I guess. But barring a miraculous throw save, it wouldn't kill you to talk about the presidential race. If that's beyond your level of culture or level of effort, at least discuss a mix of pong and politics.
