When Congspeak Goes Wrong

It's no strange thing for the workplace to have its own peculiar jargon, words used in professional conversation that the layman may not understand. It makes communication snappy and precise and keeps outsiders in the dark. At my POE, we have jargon, too. But we've also developed a way of speaking which is more peculiar and not necessarily industry related or jargonesque. I call it Congspeak.

Mr. Cong is a man on staff, part time, who does the work of a porter, i.e., sweeping, taking out the trash, polishing things here and there. He is a Vietnamese national, now an American citizen. Rumors around work are that he left Saigon from the roof of the American embassy, leaving his family behind because his life was in peril. If that is true, he later retrieved them, reuniting all eventually in the good ole U. S. of A.. Another rumor, less likely true, is that he has a cleft in his skull, under the hairline, caused by a Communist-wielded machete. Both of these rumors link to another rumor that, while in Vietnam, he was in the employ of the C.I.A..

Mr. Cong is a gentleman in the truest sense. Polite, well-mannered and considerate. He's also very short, which has given rise to tales of him having to shop for clothes in the boys department. His grasp of the English language has not been absolutely firm. His usage is usually somewhat broken, as he often employs speech without the benefit of articles, conjunctions and other parts of speech deemed necessary for normal, unbroken English. He communicates just fine, only without the spit and polish most of us employ.

When I first started working here, another co-worker, Mark, would speak to Mr. Cong by mimicking his broken pattern of speech. Mr. Cong takes no offense. He is, as I've said, a gentleman, and it would be beneath him to take offense at such silliness.

Over the years of listening to Mark talk to Mr. Cong, I and others picked up the speech pattern, using it frequently to communicate to each other. The intent has never been to poke fun at Mr. Cong, and thankfully he has never misconstrued that intent. The reason we have and continue to use Congspeak is purely for its entertainment value. However, the usage, or in this case, the overusage of Congspeak has not been without consequences.

Early in my tenure, after I had become more accustomed to understanding and speaking the dialect, I found it hard to turn off. I would find myself using Congspeak to non-speakers, often generating curious glances and furrowed brows. When I caught myself engaging in Congspeak with non-speakers, I would get a little embarrassed and switch back over to normal English, hopefully not letting on that I had just done something truly weird. It was strange. Congspeak had wormed its way into my brain and wouldn't leave!

The process of using the dialect involves normal speech that deletes articles, conjunctions and other parts of speech that smooth the edges off of the words that trip from our tongues. For example, the question, "Are you going to the store?" would be rendered, "You go to store?".  Another problem occurs when the speaker gets too excessive in the words he omits and cuts out essential meaning from his communication. Take the above sentence, drop one more word, and you have: "You go to?". Without the benefit of the word "store" or the assistance of some type of context to fill in the gaps, it's gibberish. Well, Congspeak is essentially a dialect without rules, often translated on the fly, so those things happen. Often, the listener just asks for clarification by saying, "What in the heck did you just say?" or "Was I supposed to understand that?"  These questions are often peppered with expletives, depending on the mood or the moment.

Extreme Congspeak occurs when the speaker drops all parts of speech save one or two words, usually either a noun, a verb or one of each. A more complicated sentence may be rendered by adding an adverb or adjective to this two-worded thought. An understanding of context is absolutely necessary in making sense of this austere form of speaking. What began as an entertaining form of speaking with broken English has been transformed into a guessing game, with the listener attempting to divine the speaker's intent. The speaker, in employing Extreme Congspeak to a complex thought, often speaks in a halting, gapped fashion, as he is thinking of which words he can afford to omit and which ones he must hang onto.

I still find myself slipping into Congspeak in the presence of the undiscerning, but I'm getting better. The others I work with have their own problems with Congspeak, often the excessive usage of Extreme Congspeak. Curiously enough, this habitual dialect has clung to us for most of the last 10 years I've been working here. Those of us who were using Congspeak early on have infected others. Some of these others have chronic issues with Congspeak, often lapsing into unintelligible moments of seeming random words, having no order or discernable meaning.

It's good that this is mostly in the confines of our workplace. Those who don't understand might think we're nutso.