The Language Wreckage You Didn’t Choose: How Inherited Words Shape Your Life

Abandoned fragments of a previous life. Wreckage. Leftovers bearing little resemblance to the stuff it once was.

In an off-limits-for-civilians area of a military training base, I saw remnants of walls, dams, and houses. I can only imagine who lived there before the army procured it for showing recruits how to bomb the crap out of everyday objects.
In one such spot, a gate survived. Neatly attached to bits of an equally tenacious wall. It was still fully functional.
I almost felt like closing it when the platoon trundled through there. We couldn’t have had someone’s sheep escape through that now, could we?

But what is wreckage?

I like to see it as an abandoned amusement park. Rides that once seemed magical and fun now look stark and eerie within decay.
The abandoned amusement park image is devastating because the rides didn’t change. The infrastructure is identical. The roller coaster still has the same drops, the same curves. The carousel still turns in a strong gust of wind. It’s all there, but without the lights, the music, the crowd—without the belief—it becomes something almost sinister. What was once magical now feels like a warning.

That is exactly what happens to language. Words were magical once. Genuinely.
The first time someone said “I love you” and meant it. I hope you have a memory like that. The story that moved you completely. A conversation that left you feeling fully known for the first time.

Language had electricity once.
And then slowly—through repetition, through misuse, through people wielding words as weapons or hiding behind them as shields, through a thousand “I’m fines” and “everything happens for a reason”—it slowly eroded. It wasn’t bombed into unrecognizable fragments. No. It probably happened so slowly that you can’t even remember who pushed the original context out there.

The words are still there. But you stopped believing in them.

Do people inherit the language of poverty from their families? Do some inherit the golden spoon that says, “You can do it all; you can transcend this”?

While I was still teaching, a colleague rolled into the parking lot one day, proudly driving his inherited Karmann Ghia. He loved that car. He had loved it ever since his father bought it—it was in pristine condition. He climbed out, showing us the perfect paintwork. “But better still,” he said, “the papers are in order, and everything under that hood is still producing the goods. It’s not just a good-looking vintage car.”
Other people inherit cars that, on the surface, seem like a brilliant proposition, but the cost to restore them would far outstrip any value the so-called inheritance might have.

This piece is about finding out which one you’re driving—and whether you have to, or want to, keep on driving it.

We inherit words; we inherit phrases; we inherit language that shaped our predecessors. It now shapes us. It’s inevitable. Living with somebody means adopting their culture—consciously, subconsciously, unknowingly. I just like the phrase “It is what it is.” It’s one of those serious phrases that gets passed on. A song by the band James rocks out with the title “Walk Like You,” and the lyrics point to habits and words of those who raised you. You talk like them, think like them, walk like them. This is where the wreckage of inherited language starts. You might be fortunate—the one who received that pristine model that still works in your world—or you could be the one who inherited a clunker and is now sitting between restoration, salvaging, or just selling outright without giving it away.

Language is not decoration. It’s the system operating code. When I talk about language being the OS, I’m saying it’s the guts of the human machine.
Are you trying to navigate this day using a set of instructions written by people who were just trying to survive 1970?

We wonder why we feel we “glitch.” We wonder why, when we try to do something new—like starting a business or finally standing your ground—the whole thing feels like it’s about to crash or hang. It’s not that the new idea is “broken.” It’s just that the underlying code doesn’t have a word for it.

If your internal language engine is built on the words of just getting by, it’s going to treat something such as “risk” like a house fire.

It triggers a shutdown.
You contemplate a risk, and then the shutdown-code kicks in: “Don’t get noticed.” “Keep your head down.” “Wait for permission.”

You can’t just slap a “Positive Vibes Only” sticker over a failing engine and expect the thing to pull up a hill. It’s a nice thought, but the machine doesn’t care. To change how you move, you have to get your hands dirty in the command line. You have to look at those specific, ugly strings of text that dictate how you see the world.

That sounds more “Matrix” than I intended.
Because until you start rewriting the code, you aren’t actually making choices. You’re just a passenger in a program written by people who were, let’s be honest, running on apps filled with bugs. They did their best, sure, but you’re the one who has to upgrade.

I’m not talking about accent or dialect either. I’m talking about the hidden grammar of must, should, and can’t. The sentences that live just below conscious thought. The ones you don’t even know you’re saying until someone from the outside asks, “Dude, why would you say that?”

If a child is raised with phrases like “People like us don’t get those opportunities,” “Don’t aim too high,” “Money changes people,” those “harmless” words become constraints. Not rules written down, but rules felt and demonstrated. Invisible ceilings.
On the other side, some inherit language like “Figure it out,” “You can learn anything,” “Try again.” That doesn’t guarantee contextual success, but it expands the range of thought that can lead to more movement—making risk feel survivable.

So yes, there is such a thing as a “language of poverty.” It’s not only about money, but about agency and movement. It’s a language that narrows options, lowers expectations, and paints effort as pointless or dangerous.

That is Inheritance A. The clunker. Phrases that shrink scope, predict failure, protect via smallness. The engine knocks before you even turn the key.

On the other side of the proverbial—and much-referred-to—“tracks,” the greener side, the “better” side, an inherited language of transcendence lives. Not motivational fluff or quotes on a fridge, but a quieter assumption: movement is possible.

That is Inheritance B. The Karmann Ghia. Phrases that assume movement, treat failure as data, make risk feel survivable. Not because life is easy. Because the language doesn’t shut the road down before you start walking.

Neither inheritance makes you a good or bad person. But one of them makes the next thirty years harder than they need to be.
I will never judge or blame the person who inherited the clunker. I will point out that they’re now sitting with a machine they didn’t choose.

Because unlike a rusting wreck of a car, where the parts aren’t even available anymore, language is not fixed hardware. It’s editable. Not easily. Not cleanly. But it is.

Something subtle happens when people start noticing their own phrases: “I’m bad with money” becomes “I haven’t learned this yet.” “That’s not for people like me” becomes “What would it take?” “It is what it is” becomes “What part of this can I influence?”
That shift sounds small. It isn’t. It can take a lifetime to rewire behavior over time.

One regret I have is never having had the opportunity to work with someone who meticulously restored an old car. There’s no easy route towards getting all the parts, rewriting the harness, cleaning, cutting, and swearing while you connect all the separate artifacts and discard the pieces that are no longer relevant.

In the real world, only the naive would imagine that such level of restoration would be a quick weekend project. The lifetime-rewiring project is similar. It’s just easier, in a sense, to carry on with. You won’t need a space where you will store the disassembled engine block, still dripping with oil.

An uncle of mine, way, way back, was a rep—short for representative—of a big firm. He was a salesman. More specifically, he was a travelling salesman. And the bottom line? He did quite well. Hell, he had a carphone. He didn’t graduate from university. I don’t believe he even passed matric. But give him that: due to tenacity, willpower, resolve, and maybe a few lucky breaks, he became a rep and made a good living at it.

From some sides of the family—and extending from it—there was condescension. I heard phrases like “He’s just a rep.” He drove nice cars—company cars—but he used them as his own, and he enjoyed those vehicles. The condescension extended to: those are just company cars. That “inherited” language sculpted my understanding of what a rep was, framing it as something undesirable. If you grow up with the words “just a,” it diminishes the value.

I remember Christmas lunch. Someone asked what he did. He said, “Rep for an industrial supply firm.” My father—his brother-in-law—waited two beats and said, “Well, someone’s got to do it.” Nobody laughed. Nobody defended him either. That silence taught me something. The phrase “just a rep” never needed to be said aloud again. It was already in the air.
That man out-earned half the people at that table. That didn’t matter. The language had already decided his rank.
So, this uncle also treasured some of his own linguistic gems, such as “tigers don’t cry,” and obvious ones like “man up” and “toughen up.” He wielded the well-worn saying: “Just be positive.”

I was already done with school when I began to question that platitude. “Now that you’ve spoken the words, uttered them—what do we do? Do we sit in a broken-down car and say, ‘Be positive,’ or will we translate it into saying, ‘Right, this car’s not going anywhere. We’re not going to be positive—we’re going to get out and push it out of the way’?” That’s the first part of it, the first actionable result.

Somehow, after I turned 18, I began questioning this—not in the aggressive or deliberate sense of the word, but the personal experiences surrounding the platitudes stuck. And I began wondering: Is this true?

What is the catalyst that facilitates transcendence? What is the spark?

It’s the pain that grows larger than the cost of staying the same. Not insight. Not encouragement. Not the quotes from someone’s phone. Not a better argument. Pain.

Here’s a question I have heard a few times: “What now, how does your change begin?”

That’s legit. The good part here is, once you’ve asked that question, the change to searching for different words is already in motion. The pain of not moving is invading your thoughts. That’s your own catalyst, your own spark, alongside these:

A single person who refuses to agree with your language: This is not a motivational speaker, or a coach. Someone like me, who might work alongside you, saying, “I don’t agree with that phrase.” And it quietly becomes an image you remember. At first you might think they are just full of shit.

Witnessing someone from your exact origin do something the language said was impossible: This one hits hard. “People like us never get the breaks.” Until someone from your hometown makes it big. Or, wait, someone worse off than you chooses to attempt something else.

Something that the old language cannot explain away: A motivational quote preaches “Tomorrow will be better,” and you end up having one of the worst days of your life on that day after the quote reached your phone. That’s when people can choose to look back at that quote and say, “But you were wrong, what else could be so utterly simplified and generalised that it carries no truth?”

A financial or relationship safety net is pulled away: That’s when you move, beyond the words that you knew while you enjoyed the safety. Not because you’re brave, but the alternative is worse.

A child: You can tolerate your own language for decades. Watching and listening to it come from a child’s mouth—hearing a seven-year-old say “I can’t, people like us don’t”—that pain exceeds the cost of changing.

Physical illness or burnout: The body doesn’t argue with inherited language. It just stops. When you are too tired to perform the old stoicism, too sick to “just be positive,” something falls away. And in that stripped place, a raw question appears: What do I actually believe? Not what was handed to me. Me. Illness can be a brutal catalyst.

An accidental exposure to a completely different grammatical world: A job in a different place. A military deployment. College. A book someone hands you at the right moment. You didn’t search for it. It found you. Conscription and the challenges of teaching ESL found me. The contrast between their default phrases and yours is so massive that you can’t unhear it.

This is not a manual. It doesn’t have a programme or a worksheet at the end of each chapter. What it has is a series of honest looks at the language most of us were handed before we were old enough to question it — and what happens when you finally do.

One more. My own.
For me, it was conscription, a few choice experiences in math class as a pupil, and then teaching ESL years later.
The army doesn’t care about the language you arrived with, the social status of your family; it was only geared towards packing your kit with new words—their words.

Army language teaches you how to use a rifle, blow up things, crawl through mud, and appreciate everyone else’s terrible taste in music on a Sunday in the barracks. Outside of that experience, that was a big catalyst for change. Two pivotal cracks in my world of words stay with me, to this day.

Months before my primary school days vanished, so did my health. An urgent appendix removal preceded a bowel obstruction. I had just recovered from the appendix op, and then, shortly afterward, once more—I was rushed to the hospital. I remember a few things vividly: the severe pain, the disappointment of not going on the family holiday, and a man in the same ward where I was, smoking Camel Cigarettes. In those days, it was common practice. Smokers were allowed to engage with their habit in most enclosed spaces.
To this day I can recognize the smell of a Camel Cigarette from a mile down the road.

My integration back into the education system was less than stellar. Most subjects were ok, the teachers were ok. Maths became the ground zero for a disaster that would haunt me forever. I had fallen behind in foundational work and the teacher wasn’t aware of the challenges I experienced in the previous months; he was a sub. An obstinate throwback to a perception that kids were all lazy, until proven otherwise. I did not possess the maturity, nor the language to articulate that I did not wish to be the worst dude in math that year. I fell behind, and I was lost. That’s it.

In that class, corporal punishment was an established teaching aid. Casual caning, and ridicule threaded into the curriculum of the syllabus. I became a favourite for getting called to the front, and to illustrate the guts of a trigonometry problem on the blackboard.

Only years later did I stumble across the right word to describe what I felt in those moments. Not fear, not bewilderment, but paralysis.

I could not find the words to convey any of my problems to my parents. Part of the inherited language, from those days, was “man up,” “take it like a man” and the ever-present construct that the teacher was never wrong and children “had to know their place in society.”

Seasons come and go. I lived through those days, and the first year of high school was surprisingly good. The wonder years kinda kicked in. And then the most unbelievable case of deja vu appeared on my doorstep, uninvited like a lost relative pitching up at your door. The bowel obstruction: Part 2. The middle section of my second year in high school was a repeat of the previous ordeal. I fell behind in maths. This time, a woman wielded the powerful staff—the goddess of math. If I had a time machine to go back and witness the parallels between the two experiences I had, I would have filmed myself, and written a book about the absurdity of it all.

Between the moments of paralysis and consciously understanding survival I was aware of the absurdity. Again, I was the choice subject for illustrating my lack of comprehension in front of a packed classroom.

Once, I instinctively protected myself from the cane, and the blow struck my hand. I clenched the chalk so hard, it crumbled. I couldn’t decide what was worse, having to find another writing tool, or acknowledging that the moment indeed made for some surreal comedy.

The Wall, by Pink Floyd provided an essential soundtrack for those days. The lyrics to Another Brick in the Wall provided some form of reference. I was not alone in my experiences. Roger Waters’ recollection of his school days echoed my literal and figurative pain.

The biggest victim from those days in the math class morphed into the warped phrases pertaining to productivity and performance. Even now, the simple phrase “I do not understand” gets confused with “You are too lazy to put in some effort.”
Yes, I do know the difference, and I remapped my phrases for laziness, productivity, and success years ago. But the smell of chalk dust lingers. That’s the important reminder of the realness of linguistic wreckage.

The third catalyst that irrevocably changed my perception of language wreckage happened when a wealthy benefactor treated the teachers from my school to a lavish lunch. His son was in the school. I connected some dots and did understand that some motivation behind the lunch was some form of promotion for his son’s future in the school.
I wandered into the garden later, and overheard some of the businessmen throwing around some casual banter. “A teacher is a man among children, and a child among men.” All present laughed, and chugged on expensive whiskey.

Some phrases leave that indelible mark. I could have deconstructed that day’s legitimacy in a hundred ways, but nothing would have changed. The only space where change can reside is some recognition that you did, indeed encounter a catalyst for change.
Nobody that I know of ever used the words, “I’m now processing a catalyst for change, moving towards healthier language.” But you will experience that sense of understanding, something has changed, or snapped.

You’re reading this because your current language isn’t holding up. You might not have a name for the pain yet. That’s fine. Naming it is what we are working toward. So, the wreckage is not the destination. But you do have to walk through it.

Here’s what someone is going to say: “You’re just blaming your parents. Get over it.”
I hear that. And there’s a truth in it. Obsessing over your origin story keeps you stuck in it. I’ve seen people turn inheritance into an identity, a life sentence they secretly don’t want to escape because then they’d have to take responsibility for their own mouth.

But the opposite mistake is just as dangerous: acting like the past has no gravity. Ignoring the origin story leaves you blind to your defaults. You don’t rise above your upbringing by pretending it didn’t happen. You rise above it by seeing it clearly enough to choose which parts to keep.

So let me be precise. There is a difference between an excuse and an explanation. An excuse says, “This is why I can’t.” An explanation says, “This is why I learned to think this way—now what do I want to keep?”
The useful stance is neither guilt nor dismissal. It’s recognition. You don’t apologize for the car that showed up in your driveway. But you also don’t keep driving it into the same ditch while saying, “Well, that’s just how it was given to me.”
It means breaching boundaries.
In this context, transcendence is not escaping your origin. It is not becoming someone else. It is not being ridiculously rich, collecting credentials and titles, or owning the address on the hill.

Transcendence is the ability to hold and recognize your inherited language in one hand and a different possibility in the other—and choosing the different possibility more often.
This is not a “positive thinking” piece. I am not going to tell you to manifest anything. The uncle who said “just be positive” wasn’t wrong that attitude matters. He was wrong that attitude is enough. Transcendence without action is just a nicer cage.

My colleague didn’t restore that Karmann Ghia. His father did. He just received it. That’s inheritance at its best—someone else did the hard work of keeping the engine true, and you get to drive.

But most of us don’t have that. Most of us got the car with the rusted frame, the engine that knocks, the electrical system that fails in the rain. And no one is coming to restore it for us.

So here’s the only question this post is really asking: Are you going to keep driving it because it’s what showed up in the driveway? Or are you going to pop the hood and start learning which parts are yours to replace?

You inherited a voice. Now you decide how much authority it still has.
That’s not a motivational quote. That’s just the work.