Points of Reference

A few months back, when I still had girl hair, I needed to get it up off my neck.

"Hey, do you have a binder?" I asked the friend I was with.

"What?"

"A binder. A hair binder."

"What?"

"You know, a...I don't know, a ponytail holder."

"OH, a HAIR tie."

Uh, yeah. A binder.


It's always fascinating to me how easily we talk past one another, how sometimes even the simplest reference points fail to compute for someone raised a coast--or even just a few hundred miles--away.

Some of these little glitches of language we all know about. When I call it a pop, you might laugh at my midwesternness, but you know what I'm talking about, the same way I get that you ordering a grinder doesn't require a trip to a strip club.

But there are still terms, or phrases, or shorthand that not only betray our origins, they confuse the rest of the world. My friend wasn't just fucking with me; she literally had no idea what a "binder" was. 

It's especially thorny in writing; the whole point of putting things into words is to convey meaning--specific meaning--but authenticity, especially in things like dialogue, requires us to also use particular terminology. 

When I grew up, folks from towns near mine called us "cake-eaters," which they meant us to understand as "snobs." Our town had a reputation for being Richie-Richville, so our neighbors derived a fairly intellectual put-down, referencing Marie Antoinette's infamous, apocryphal quote about the peasantry's lack of bread, "well then, let them eat cake." 

If I saw that term in a book, that's what I'd think.

A few generations back, though, people would have thought the author was using a homosexual slur.

A couple generations before that, it would have meant "ladies man." 

And for most of the world, through most of history, it wouldn't "mean" anything. 

Slang is the hardest; a term that might make perfect sense in a small pocket around Culver City California might be meaningless in Allentown, PA. Worse, at least as a YA writer, a term that's totally right-now-hip in Boston, MA might be something only moms say in Oregon. 

So is it possible to speak authentically AND understandably? 

You think on that, I need to go pick up some binders.