Yo! (요, よ)

I used to use very casual language when talking to others, liberally starting off sentences with "dude," or just "yo!" "hey man...." I became famous with my co-workers at one job I worked on for starting off sentences with "Hey, so..............." Over the course of time, I've become more watchful of how I address others, so I don't usually start off with "Yo!" because it's not as respectful. Especially after learning about Korean and Japanese and their emphasize on using polite language, I've definitely lessened the use of "yo!" except for really close friends who I can show more casualness to.


Except in Korean and Japanese, "Yo" is pretty polite......It's a sentence-ending particle in Korean, for example, used specifically to make sentences more polite, to have the ending sound softer, less abrupt. So yo is back in style! In Japanese is also a sentence-ending particle but doesn't really change the politeness level, more just affirming a fact or assuming the person you're talking to knows the information.

Casualness is not all bad.......When I use "yo" in English it indicates that I trust the person and I can relax because we both know who we are, we don't need to convince each other through language that we're decent person. However, when meeting other people, though, it is important to be as polite as possible, even in English! I do kind of judge people based on how they talk to me. (for example, when the guy at Oleego, a Korean restaurant keeps calling me "boss" when I order from there). I don't think being called "boss!" is that polite. It has a bit if a saucy nuance to it, like "what up boss." "Hey chief." Maybe it was corrupted in high schools across the U.S., but calling someone "boss" doesn't make them feel more respected, in fact the opposite, like kind of making me your friend, but not your friend! I prefer being called "sir."

I bring this up because it's important to watch how we speak, even filler words and sentence-ending particles like yo, in any language! Language is precise, each variation in how someone says something changes the meaning just a tad. Heck, Nancy Pelosi completely changes the meaning of her clap at the President's State of the Union Speech with a slight tilt of the head and the changing of her hand position when clapping! And language is the same: Adding one little part to a sentence or leaving it out can make a ton of difference. it's one of the more fascinating things about how people communicate. In Japan and some Asian cultures, the right politeness level makes all the difference between getting the job or not!

I've also taken out swear words/ expletives almost completely from my jargon, my word bank. At my new law firm, there's a culture of using expletives, but it's in a funny way, used sparingly for bigger effect when used to describe other attorneys' bad behavior and express dismay at certain results. Can't overuse it or else it loses its effect. I'm trying to learn Korean now, and MJ has done a good job of not teaching me many swear words, but I have picked up on one word, "saekki," and unfortunately it just kinda rolls off the tongue, so I say it pretty often because it's fun to say. I feel like most new words are spread this way: they're kind of just fun to say. None of them are as as easy and addicting to use as my original, though: "Yo!"

Fantasize on,

Robert Yan