Today my five-year-old sister was trying (and failing) to rap at the dinner table. She said something like Yo yo giggity yo, Hope Kathryn is in da house yall and she's eating her din-din-dinner. And at first, my father responded with Don't quit your day job, kid. And as she went on, I think he was starting to get annoyed because her vocabulary was steadily declining, and vocabulary is something we strongly reinforce in our house. When she said Daddy, I wanna be a rapper when I grow up, he had a sort of please-just-shoot-me-now look on his face. Then my seven-year-old sister joined in with the rap about dinner, and my dad said something like The vocabulary you are using does not make you sound intelligent at all, so knock it off. When he said that, I immediately thought of that ridiculous intelligence test we took in class that had to do with 'black vocabulary' and the other one that basically had to do with drugs. And I thought about how when I was reading the first one with the 'black vocabulary' I could hear people saying the words in my head, and it was hard to listen to those voices because they just sounded so unintelligent to me. But after the test I thought to myself that anyone who knows half these words is definitely smarter than I am.
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