Watch Your Language!

My family moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma (from Bloomington, Indiana) when I was five years old. Our first residence was an apartment called Berkley Square on 51st between Harvard and Yale. The apartment doesn't exist anymore and a Marie Calendar's now stands on the site where our building used to be.

When we first moved in, we met a young girl who was around our age (my brother was 7 and my sister was 8) who greeted us with, "Hi, y'all!"

"What!?" It was the "y'all" that threw us. She must have said it about twenty times during the course of our conversation. We went back to our apartment and told our mother about our new friend - "She said 'y'all'." It was then and there that each of the three of us vowed that we would never use the particular colloquialism.

Of course, over several years and through repeated exposure, the expression slipped into our vocabulary and is now very comfortable for us to say.

There is a new expression that has creeped into the vernacular that, when I first heard it, I again swore I would never use - "My bad."

It really confused me at first. I had to ask the guy, "What did you just say?" and asked him to explain it to make sure I understood that it meant "my fault." Now, it just makes my skin crawl to think about it. It's like some of the paraphrasing of the Bible* - it's just wrong.

My problem now is that, just this morning, I heard it used in a radio commercial... and I was comfortable with it. And that scared me. I don't want it to creep into my vocabulary.

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*The Lord takes care of me as his sheep... Yes, though I go through the valley of deep shade, I will have no fear of evil... Psa23 - Just doesn't have the same impact, does it?