Yeppers

Yes. I'm all for plain-speaking; say exactly what you mean and don't beat around the bush, or hem and haw.  Rip that verbal band-aid right off, I usually say.  Spit it out, preferably in ten words or less, before my attention span wanders off.  I am the very last person who would blather on for ten minutes about my colon before getting close to a point.  In fact, people often refer to me as abrupt, especially at work, because I often just walk up and start saying what I need to say without even bothering with the courtesy of "hello" first.  When I am in a groove, when my brain is running on all 5.32 cylinders, I get very focused on one thing.  This is what I need, I'll say, then wait for a response impatiently; when I want to know, I want to know NOW.  Give me my piece of cheese first, and then you can talk about the maze while I munch.

And yet...I have acquired a few odd verbal habits over the years.  Nothing monstrous, nothing that requires speech therapy or a good smack upside the head.  Just little verbal idiosyncrasies. One of them is shoplifting words. My brain is always listening for the odd turn of a phrase, or the random bright and shiny word, and when it finds them, they are gobbled up and tossed into the salad that is my own sort of language.

I have no idea where I found "yeppers".  Probably it was lying, passed out cold, under a park bench after a particularly bad all-day bender, and I felt sorry for it. I'm as much a sucker for a lost word as I am for an underdog. I am not even sure if it is even a word, but it sounds interesting, and it seems to imply the affirmative, so there it is, smack dab between "Okey-Dokey" and "Ja".   People seem to understand what I mean when I say it, and nobody in all these years has stopped to ask me what the heck I am talking about.  Of course, they could be saying such things to themselves, not wanting to be considered impolite.  My son, who is still very spontaneous, will speak right up and ask me what a "yeppers" is, every time.  I still don't have a good answer for him.  

Surely I'm not the only one who picks up the odd word here and there.  My husband will randomly throw in the word "negativos!" just because a long ago Spanish teacher used to scream it at him during class.  There have to be others who have acquired the odd word here and there from mere contact with the outside world.  It's inevitable, with all of our interactions with the many, many people we encounter each day through the years.  If you do have any random words floating about, leave them in the comments, just as you would a penny in one of those "have a penny/need a penny" dishes at a cash registers.  Maybe I'll find a new shiny to replace "yeppers".