I’m going to share an experience I just had in the best West Texas vernacular I can fashion. Truth be told, that voice is a quick go-to for me—my immediate response, my first sentiment, my instinctive way of reacting when life catches me off guard. It is the voice of talking to my friends back home in West Texas and saying, with all the force and feeling the moment requires, “DANG!”
Those are my origins. That is part of my identity.
All of us carry complex identities—some we share openly, others we hold close. We move through different worlds with different registers, tones, languages, and ways of being. Sometimes we speak as scholars, sometimes as teachers, sometimes as relatives, neighbors, advocates, or old friends.
So tighten your belt buckle, friends, and watch the video of today’s backyard
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Well, y’all, I was just mindin’ my own business in the backyard today, sittin’ there peaceful as can be, when I heard a rustlin’ sound that caught my attention.
So I did what any calm, mature adult would do: I started recording.
At first, I spotted one little armadillo. Cute enough. Then there were two. Then three. And before I knew it, there were four of them—like some neatly coiffed, armored mariachi band had wandered onto the property, polished up and ready to perform.
Without a booking!
Now, I began this episode calm and collected, but let the record show that my composure left the premises before the armadillos did.
That’s when I reached for a small metal chair. Not a broom. Not a rake. A chair. Because apparently, when the spirit of self-defense takes hold, you don’t choose the weapon—the patio furniture chooses you.
So there I was, shushing four armadillos off like I was directing livestock traffic at a county fair: “Git now! Go on! This ain’t your Airbnb!” (Okay, I added this part 'cause it's funny!)
And they just moseyed along like they had all the time in the world—we’re talking seconds here. It's all recorded.
Geez, what do moments like these mean? Well, among other things, they remind us that humor is part of memory. Voice is part of place.
It is a treat to travel back to my childhood and imagine just how much play a story like this would have gotten back home—told and retold in those wonderful, undervalued forms of expression that rarely get honored in a society where “network English” is still treated as the norm. These power dynamics put dialects at risk.
That we are often expected to suppress the dialects we speak alongside our language or languages is a matter for another time, but it says plenty about how power shapes even the way we write and talk from day to day.
Another lesson is that the language we reach for when startled, delighted, or emotionally disarrayed often tells us something about where we come from. Identity, after all, is not only serious. It can be playful, too—especially when life humbles us through four armadillos and one very small metal chair.
Today, the backyard gave me armadillos.
West Texas gave me the Twang to tell it.
And maybe it’s no wonder I became a sociolinguist.
Even if that was in a former life.
GREAT
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