A funny thing happened while shepherding my girl into young adulthood: I became just like my granny. I look in the mirror and see the obstinate gray hairs framing my face, and then there’s the fact that I can’t get up off the couch too quickly for fear of pulling a muscle I had no idea existed. Natural aging, they call it.

But there’s another kind of Granny behavior that just tickles me. It’s the kind in which I open my mouth and out come the words she once spoke to me, the same words that would make me bristle. Never in a million years did I imagine I would be my granny, yet here we are. And she passed on some doozies.

The first time I remember uttering Granny’s words, in her tone, was a day I was preparing dinner, and my then-little one wouldn’t stop asking questions. I couldn’t tell you the questions, but I must have needed just a little quiet, because out of my mouth came, “Leh me hear whey the wind blowin’ from.” Of course, then came another barrage of questions about where the wind really blows from, and what makes the wind blow. However, the best part of the memory is that my little one tried whistling to imitate the wind to let me know where it was blowing from. We both cracked up.

The grannyisms just kept coming. There were the classics that demanded respect: “You getting too big for your boots” and “Don’t tek yuh eyes and pass me.” Or the dire warning about consequences for not listening to advice: “When you don’t hear, you does feel.” And the ever-present “Mind yuh business.” I’m not positive that my girl understood what each phrase meant exactly, but she certainly got the context and the message.

There was one that I especially bristled at as a tween trying to figure out friendships. Clearly, my granny had some thoughts and told me frequently enough, “Show me your company and I will tell you who you are.” The kicker is that I have the same indignant internal response now as I did then, but these words escaped my lips at some point when I felt I needed to provide my teenage daughter with guidance. And I watched her try to hide the bristling because, clearly, I “just drop from a coconut tree” and could never understand.

Now that I’m like Granny, some of these sayings have taken on much more poignancy. For example, she would say, “Feed dem with a long spoon,” as a reminder that it’s necessary to establish boundaries in some of your relationships. In my innocence, I always imagined a spoon with a dramatically long handle, and I thought it was the funniest thing ever. Having traversed a bit of life now, I feel this one in my bones, and have certainly passed it on to my young adult trying to navigate the complexities of who she is in relation to the world.

In moving to the high-context culture of Utah, there is one cultural saying that became most appropriate: “All skin teeth nah laugh.” It translates loosely as, just because someone is smiling with you doesn’t mean that they are on your side. For me and mine, it has certainly been an adjustment to learn the difference in cultural norms and communications style here. You see, Guyanese tend to be very direct, and you’ll generally know where you stand with someone. As you can imagine, it was quite the change for me when I met the “Utah nice” phenomenon where, for example, a very pleasantly spoken “maybe” can mean a strong “no.” It is a place where our generally straightforward way of speaking might be interpreted as unkind because it didn’t come in the right cultural communication package. My girl and I both learned to navigate, as people do in new places. I even fell in love with and married a Utah man.

I picked up one particular saying from eavesdropping surreptitiously on Granny’s conversations with friends: “Yuh mek yuh children, but yuh doan mek they mind.” I have internalized this one, going through my girl’s teen years, and now standing on the sidelines watching with bated breath as she navigates early adulthood and working on being the main character in her own story. I’m hoping and praying that these grannyisms offer her as much guidance as they gave me — and, like me, she won’t see them as “old and schupid” anymore.

Nicola A. Corbin is an associate professor of communication at Weber State University, where she teaches public relations and mass media courses and directs the university’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning.

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