More Loss Than Maintenance

It is hard to be deprived of my native language--so hard, in fact, that I now believe the maintenance-loss theory of language acquisition to carry more weight than I did previously. Look how crappy that sentence was! Don't you believe it, too? Another result of my Englishlessness has been my utter neglect of my blogging duties. Sorry. Forgive me. Thanks!

What struggling through sentences in this mysterious foreign tongue reveals even more convincingly than a confirmation of the maintenance-loss hypothesis is my own speech patterns. I have gained a great deal of awareness on how I conceptualize and produce my utterances since, speaking in a language I know cripplingly worse than my own, I have had to consciously mull over my lexical and syntactic choices every time I open that beautiful mouth situated on my face.*

So what are my revelations on my language use? I have come to realize that I am an awfully vague speaker. I use useless filler phrases such as "or something" just about every other sentence, I rely heavily on spatial terms that denote "here" and "there," and I like to qualify everything I say by beginning my utterances with "I think" or "I wonder." But maybe that's just the narcissism talking.  

 Narcissus and Echo, ECHO, ECHO!

*I forgot whether everyone in the U.S. has mouths on their faces--here they definitely do, though.