Culture

So it has unfortunately taken me a while to spit another blog out, but I've finally got something to say. Our culture is obviously different than other cultures when it comes to our customs, language, and values. When I was thinking of some words/phrases/and sayings that we use compared to other cultures, the one word I came up with to describe it was sarcasm. When I started working at a restaurant as a hostess, I met a busser who was from Columbia. He didn't speak much english because he had just moved to America, but I managed to learn just a little bit about him. He had told me that he moved here by himself to stay with his Aunt and Uncle to make money for his family who still lives in Columbia. Recently, however, he has improved his English dramatically and I am able to carry on hour long conversations with him. I asked him how he learned English so well and he said he learned it just by talking to other people in English. When I asked if it was hard to learn, he laughed and said that it was incredibly hard, because there are so many words that have different meanings. He also mentioned that he had a hard time understanding people at first when they were being sarcastic. When he said that it clicked into my head that we had a discussion about this in class, and how real it is in our society today. As I was driving home I was thinking about how hard it would be to enter a new country, without parents, not speaking the native language. I think that we use sarcasm in our language because we have gotten so comfortable with eachother we don't think about the double meanings to what we say. When people say "Shutup!" or "I hate you!" that can be understood more ways than one. I was walking in the hallway last thursday and I heard one girl yelling "Shutup! I hate you!" when she was trying to flirt with another boy, but then I turned the corner and somebody yelled "Shutup!" and it was apparent that they were actually mad at the person they were yelling it to. To somebody just entering our culture and trying to adapt to the language, it would be very difficult to understand the meanings behind our words if we were all always sarcastic. Before my friend from Columbia learned was even the word sarcasm was, he was confused. Obviously people won't ever stop being sarcastic; I don't think that it is always bad. But I do think that it is important for people to think before they speak to different people, because what they say could be taken the wrong way.