Aw, Man!

We’ll take the hippies and the hipsters, but not the Irish!

For some reason today I realized that I have been using the word man as a general epithet, greeting, and acknowledgement since I was about ten years old — which was probably the last time it was cool, hip lingo. Not to mention the last time it wasn’t humiliating. Not to mention my probable emotional age. Let it drift.

I can remember my Mother admonishing me to stop using it in her presence because she considered it to be, I don’t know — smartassy? uncultured? simply annoying? But obviously her shaming me didn’t have much effect; when I’m not thinking I still call everyone man, as in “Thanks, man!” or “Hey, man!”

Today for some reason I suddenly found myself ashamed of this. I’m a middle-aged grown up, after all, but I call everyone man like it’s still 1975 in my head (I also have the wardrobe of a hobo unless The Duchess cleans me up for adult events, so what?). In many ways it is 1975 n my head; I still expect everything to cost fifteen cents, including gallons of gas and shoes, and get very cranky when presented with invoices costing more; just ask The Duchess. But that’s no excuse. Today in the grocery store I told the kid working the checkout line Thanks, man and he looked at me as if I’d turned to dust and crumbled away in front of his eyes.

OLD HABITS, OLD MAN

Language gets embedded like that. We all need our go-to phrases and lines, the things we utter when we’re on autopilot, or don’t have time to think. Thanks, man just pops out, and in my head it sounds friendly and loose, casual in a cool way. Because that’s how it was when I first picked it up, a bunch of scurvy street kids playing Wiffle Ball with black electrical tape on our bats, doing complicated handshakes when we met up every day. Calling each other man because someone saw it on TV or something one day.

What bothers me is the lack of evolution and the lack of consciousness; I prefer to think I am captain of the S.S. Jeff Somers, this shambolic body I inhabit, and not merely a doughy-eyed passenger. A long time ago the word dude entered my lexicon about the same time it entered everyone approximately my age, and I spent a long time rooting it out and eliminating it, for the most part. Because dude may be the worst word ever invented, and must be burned from our minds. Once in a while I use dude ironically, and once in a while I regress 20 years in a moment and it slips out, but it’s rare. I won the Dude War. So the ongoing battle against Man irks me: Every time I utter the word I feel like a jackass.

EVERY MAN

Of course, what’s the alternative? I suspect man persists in my everyday speech because it’s egalitarian in its way. Take the boy at the grocery: What should I use to address him? Thanks, kid makes me feel like I’m 105 years old, or possibly in a old noir movie. I could go with just an unadorned thanks, but that sounds abrupt to my ear, almost rude. I could go full-on hipster and make up nicknames for everyone — thanks, Stretch; thanks, Noodles; thanks, Starscream — but somehow I expect that won’t solve my problem. Maybe this is why some people just smirk silently at everything. It saves them the embarrassment of calling someone Chuckles or something.

See, with Man, it’s levelling: Everyone is Man. You’re all my equal when I whip out the circa-1980 secret handshake and call you man (and yet if I said Thanks, woman to a lady I’d likely be entered into some sort of police database, or possibly a Future Cyborg Watchlist). On the other hand, man seems acceptable to me mainly because for one brief shining moment it was considered cool. I could say Thanks, person! and it would be just as universal, but because it sounds so robotic and nerdy, it just doesn’t have the same panache … panache that perhaps only exists in my tiny, booze-soaked brain.

So, man remains, like mild brain damage I can’t cure. So be it. If only I didn’t sound like such an idiot when I used it.