What?

In the course of growing up, I went to a few different schools, in which the children had their own different idioms. The children's vocabulary was vastly different depending on the ecomnic level of the parents.

At the first school I went to, which was in a middle class area, the children spoke normal English and were children of ex-hippies. They never looked down on my ethnicity, in fact they used to say things like, "We are all God's children anyway and borthers and sisters in the way God sees it." They were mostly Caucasian kids.

When my mother bought a small house, the only thing she could afford was in a lower class neigborhood. We were close to our cousins, but the children there were immediately intmidated by my vocabulary. They accused me of being prejudice, and we were both Hispanic. I had to go home and ask my mother what 'prejudice' meant, and I still had no idea what they meant by it. Now that I am older, I figure they were trying to say I was being pompous with my word choices.

They also used the term "mode-ed" this meant that you had been shown up, and had no response left since you were dumnstruck, and thus 'mode-ed'. I had no idea what that meant. My standing and trying to discern what they meant added to my being 'mode-ed', not a good thing.

My mother remarried and we moved to an upper class neighborhood, the vernacular changed once again. Now I wasn't told I was 'mode-ed' but when they didn't like what I had to say I was tols to "shine- on". What? I was behooved to ask a fellow classmate what that meant. It seems they didn't want to hear me out and so I was told to 'shine-on'. I was under the impression that it had something to do with male masterbation practices. My first response was to tell them, "Same to You!" I know it didn't make much sense to them, but I thought they were calling me a "jack-off". I wasn't going to let them.

One thing I have learned was the nicer the neighborhood, the less my being Native America and Mexican mattered. At least they were polite enough not to make it an issue. As for the kids that talked disparagingly of my vocabulary, well they were uneducated and insecure. I have come to apperciate other idioms in my travels and it is something I excel at now. Even if every once in a while I still have to ask,.......What?