Casual Speech Impediment

If you’ve ever had someone tell you “Hey is for horses but not for me.” then you might have a casual speech impediment. Casual speech is a way of talking with people whom you are closely associated. Generally it is used among family, friend and people of similar age and status. However various cultures have different ideas about the taboos of lax language and the perceptions its use implies.

In English it may be something as subtle as using contractions like don’t or we’re. Or it could be simplifying grammar. For example dropping the word “that” when saying “I thought you were coming” instead of saying “I thought that you were coming.” Other times it’s more blatant when conversation is colored with slang or modernized into a version of English like African America Vernacular English where plurals are ignored and substituting the word be for is, are or am.

A dialect like this is perhaps one of the hardest types of casual speech to overcome. On Courtney Cox’s show Cougar Town she asks a friend to throw something at her every time she slips into a southern drawl while her father is visiting. Whenever she lets a “Fixin’ to” or “Y’all” eek into the conversation something is hurled in her direction causing her to consciously change what she is fixin’ to say.

While it would be nice if you had your own personal Professor Henry Higgins to educate you on the elegant elocution of aristocratic society you can train yourself to listen for linguistic mistakes. Make sure your verb choice is the correct tense, and that you don’t add too many colloquialisms. You might be proud that at your last job you kept yourself as busy as a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest but a recruiter might not find it so impressive.

Once you’re hired and on the job for a while it’s more acceptable to fall into friendly conversation but an interview is not the place you want to let your grammar guard down. Whether raised in the Deep South or the inner city, how you speak can affect the opinion of people you meet even if the stereotype isn’t true. Because of this you need to be particularly conscientious in conversations with potential employers.

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By Heather Fairchild - Heather is a multimedia developer, business owner and work-from-home mom.