I remember this time when I was in junior high. We were on vacation in Atlanta during Christmas break, getting to hang out with family and friends there. In fact, it probably wasn’t more than six months after we had moved away from Atlanta, because as I remember I was still weirded out by the fact that my best friend was dating the girl I’d broken up with because I’d moved.
But weirded out or not, it didn’t affect our relationship at all. The two of us were happy to hang out together, and one night during the week we went to the mall. And by “we went,” I mean that my mom dropped us off and then came back to meet us at the entrance to J.C. Penny sometime before 9:00.
I thought my friend was the coolest guy on the face of the earth. He saw every movie that hit the theatres. He played trombone (which was infinately less dorky than the clarinet). He wore funny t-shirts and a backwards ball cap, and actually had 20 pounds on me that allowed him to fit into JNCOs. For a not-quite-thirteen-year-old in 1998, that was as cool as it got.
We looked around at PacSun and wherever else he thought was cool. And at some point we stopped at some trendy smoothie shop that had just opened to get a snack.
They guy working there was probably sixteen, but he seemed immensley older and cooler than me, or even my best friend. I don’t really remember anything about him except that he had spikey blond hair and a black apron and he had the kind of chill, trendy vocabulary that I understood, but never would have strung together in cool sentences in the same way.
I also remember him because he genuinely smiled at us the whole time we were there.
Most people working at hole-in-the-wall food joints in the mall will only talk to you for the bare minimum amount of time and with the fewest, least enthusiastic amount of words that it takes to recieve an order and hand you a meal, all the while with a totally slack expression. That goes double when they are dealing with two twelve-year-old boys, who they seem to assume are too idiotic to understand the menu and count change on their own (and which I was always prepared to take offense to, as my mom encouraged me to order my own food from about as early as I could actually remember what I liked at different places).
At any rate, the guy actually treated us like we were his buddies, and didn’t seem condescending at all. He probably just laughed to himself after we left, but he did seem like a really nice guy. And my friend just totally fed off his cool demeaner and trendy slang. I recognized that for what it was even then, but I still wished I was as cool as either one of them.
After we had both ordered, my friend decided to make a change. He had asked for an orange soda with whatever he got. He probably decided he was running low on fundalation, something else I recognized for what it was even at the time, but made no mention of (in sociology, that’s dealing with a “faulty performance,” which we do because we assume at some point in the future we will need someone else to ignore a faulty performance on our part- I did pay attentionin Mrs. Belloat’s class!).
At any rate he said (and this is one of the few things about that night I remember so clearly), “You know what… scratch that orange soda.” To which the cool smoothie maker responded “Scratch the orange soda? Okay.”
Why in the heck am I telling you this story? Because the other day I used the phrase “scratch that.” Nobody other than me would take any notice of that. I don’t even realize when other people use that phrase. But it is a phrase that I just would not incorporate into my own vocabulary at all. It slips out when I’m trying to sound cool.
It’s not even a really cool phrase. But I strongly associate it with the spikey-haired trendy teenager and my cool friend that didn’t want an orange soda. I wonder how many of these things slip into our speech or our thoughts unconciously. It actually surprises me that I remember why this one entered my pwn personal lexicon, and interests me to no end that even though I know where it came from and why I say it and can distinguish it from other choices of oration, there it remains in the pool from which I draw my words.
