Have you ever wondered why people feel the need to stand on the same ground with others? The feeling of isolation will come when you stand out from the rest. Like birds of a feather, we tend to flock together with the stubbornness of a mule; refusing to be a different kind of person in the crowd.
We call that conformity.
I was thinking about this as I was speaking to my Singaporean friend with broken English (read : Singlish =P). The thing is, my accent used to be a nice, clean American accent which sounded great and I was considerably fluent. But, without realizing it, the 4 years I spent in Singapore have changed my accent (to my horror!) into Singlish!
I have slipped into Singlish without a full realization of what I was doing. The moment I realized this (2 days ago, when someone mentioned that my accent was so Singlish that he mistook me for a Singaporean), I tried to changed it back to American accent again. And I succeeded, for a degree.
The funny thing is, suddenly people couldn’t understand me =P It’s a bit funny since I spoke with quite a decent accent and not in Singlish (which has many mistakes in pronunciation). An FYP student in the lab actually thought that I had said moody-meter instead to multimeter (duh ^^”), although to me the difference of the two is quite obvious.
It’s rather worrying that we are all being conformed into our surrounding without even realizing it. Often, we are shaped by our surrounding and we, sinful human that we are, compromise our integrity to “get along” better with others. Often, the small things that we all do in order to be accepted in the circle is the one that tells how strong our determination is to stand to our values.
“Relax the rules la. No one will know.”
“Don’t be such a strict person.”
And if rational reasons fail, there is always emotional “blackmail” :
“Come on. Do it for me if you are the kind person that you say you are.”
“You are my friend. Why won’t you cover me up for the sake of our friendship?”
In the end, of course the choice is in the our hands. The final choice to compromise or not lies in us and us only. People can tempt you, influence you, coerce you, but in the end, we are the one who say yes or no.
May we all have the courage to do what is right. As the saying goes :
To know the right thing to do is knowledge. To do the right thing, is wisdom.
One who is wise is cautious and turns away from evil, but a fool is reckless and careless ~Proverbs 14:16~
Nice post. I moved to the South after growing up in New England and have noticed that over the past 5 years I have begun to develop a Southern accent. I think it is only natural to imitate what we hear on a daily basis.