When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
It's hard for me to get embarrassed, but the things that do embarrass me would be if anybody ever heard my wife and I talking in our robust, made-up language.
The long history of conversations that family members share contributes not only to how listeners interpret words but also to how speakers choose them.
What I said to my family is, 'Our history is our own. Let people write what they want, we know who we are.'
I'm a grown woman. I can come up with plenty of things that I've done and said or didn't say or failed to do that remain with me as sources of embarrassment.
Everything you say in a family carries meaning from all that was said before. So with friends, there is less likelihood of a few words triggering associations from childhood, where our deepest emotions often are rooted.
It's human nature to not say everything that's on your mind at the time you think it. Because we fear saying something that people will laugh at, people will think is dumb. We're afraid of being embarrassed.
It's hard sometimes to not want to know what people are saying behind your back and to ignore certain things that are being written.
Every time I've talked about my family in the past, people have ended up getting upset. So I said to my friends and family: 'I shan't refer to you at all, and there's nothing for you to get upset about. There's the deal.'
You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.
You know, you're living in a society where if you say something that you might think may be OK, when it's more sensitive to that particular culture. You have to be very, very careful.
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