Back when our oldest son was 16 we yelled at him.
We yelled at him a lot when he was 16 mostly for not doing things we told him to do like taking out the garbage or picking up his little brother from little league.
We forget what exactly he did or more likely did not do that merited our yelling at him this particular time. What we do remember was his response:
“Sorry, my bad.” He said.
Did we mention the fact that we are white? Not only white but Jewish? Not only White and Jewish but live in a town where the population of black people can be counted on one hand and the nearest ghetto is a thousand miles away.
Hearing the words ‘my bad’ from my white teenage son struck me as both incongruous and out right silly.
So we yelled at him some more.
“MY BAD!!!?, MY BAD!!!?”
Did we forget to mention we have a thing about appropriate slang for the appropriate ethnic group?
It drives us nuts when we hear a Yiddishism out of the mouths of an obvious gentile, a French or German phrase from a pseudo-intellectual pretending to be smart with a bad accent and worst of all hearing Latin from a lawyer. We know when a lawyer goes to Latin we are getting screwed.
Now living in a melting pot we do expect some kind of leakage from one culture to another.
English at its best is particularly adaptable and inclusive of all the European languages. Born out of wedlock to a bastard Norman French father and a Saxon mother with a little bit of Celtic in the family tree English has no claim to either being ancient or noble. American English even less so.
But still one has to have standards and while speaking improperly may be okay in the ghetto or in rap, black speech, so called ebonics, has no place coming out of the white mouths twisted with a flat nasally western accent.
It is just wrong.
Which brings us to Snow White and the seven dwarves.
Ever since we saw that movie a million years ago the song “Hi Ho” drifts in and out of our head especially when we are working or walking.
And while Sleepy, Dopey and Doc whistle in our reverie we often greet people with a Hey Ho!! ourselves.
Well we did until last week when a middle aged white woman literally flipped out when we naively said it.
“I am not a ho don’t you dare call me that!” She said.
At first we had no idea what she was talking about. Hearing ho from a middle aged white woman was even more incongruous and silly than hearing ebonics from my son.
It is not the swearing or insulting is foreign to us but ho is something we would never think to call a woman. Zona maybe, sharmuatah definitely, or even heure which is reserve for the deepest contempt, but ho? It simply wasn’t in our vocabulary and we would feel embarrassed about using it. We would be guilty of linguistic theft.
She might of thought we were subtly insulting her. The problem is while we have been accused of many things, subtle ain’t one of them.
Actually we think she was reaching for it. But if she wasn’t then all we can simply:
Sorry, my bad.