Thursday, December 01, 2005

11215 Dialect

This morning, at the intersection of Union Street and 5th Avenue, I jumped the gun. Although there wasn't a walk signal, the path looked clear. The woman in her late 20's next to me seemed to think so too. We both started walking, then looked both ways, realized there was in fact oncoming traffic, and said at the same exact time, "Maybe not."

Maybe not. Is this just what people say in that situation? I doubt that most would find it necessary to talk to themselves/impress the strangers around them with their take on what has just gone down. If I were a linguist, I might trace "maybe not" back to the same language group as "I feel like."

More questions. Is it possible that our using the same words at the same time indicates some sort of shared lifestyle? And given the fact that I found this incident to be worthy of a blog posting, is it a lifestyle that could use a little spicing up?

No comments: