Every school has different words for things, and we all forget that they are different at every campus. It took my friend from Dartmouth five minutes to explain to me that "blitzing" meant checking his e-mail. We all call our mailrooms, libraries, and dining halls by their last names – at Columbia, it's Lerner, Butler, and Jay. Hey, no one outside of your campus knows what the hell you're talking about. Shut up and call them "mailrooms," "libraries," and "dining halls."



Most people learn the words they use from listening to other people speak. This is why I'm puzzled that some professors are so out of it when it comes to slang. The saddest thing is to see the professors that are out of touch convince themselves that they can be "hep," "cool," and even "down with that." I actually had a teacher tell me once that "there are some thing with which one should not get jiggy." Ouch.



When you hang out a lot with one person or a close knit group of friends, you tend to forget that some people don't understand your inside jokes. This is why I never figured out how people can have two girlfriends – I'd constantly be making references to things that only one of them understands.



In any group of friends, there's always the phrase guy. The one guy who says all these cool phrases that everyone copies for a semester, until he says a new cool phrase that they can copy. In a big group of friends, there are two or three of these guys. In a fraternity, they're called "the executive board."



When I got to college, I learned that everyone here speaks differently. We all use words like "sketchy" and "tool" that no one ever uses back home. That's why I don't go home any more. Cause when I do, no one will understand me.



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