How to Speak Guy

The immutable third law of human conversation is that males do not speak to other males the same way they speak to the fairer gender. To do so would be a denial of your conversation partner's rights as a man and an assault on his very manhood. To emasculate one's speech is tantamount to physical castration, a painfully disturbing and altogether unnecessary visual, at least from my reading of Freud. In order to help you, the Faithful FCN Few, avoid this pitfall of human interaction, we provide this how-to guide. Follow the guidelines herein and you'll be speaking guy in no time.

Use short greetings. No guy in his right mind would put together a greeting longer than two words. "Hey, how are you?" is so long that it threatens the auditory attentiveness of the average male. The question is so long that the feelings of the respondent can actually change from the moment the first syllable is uttered until the voice inflection changes to signal the question mark. The respondent has no way of knowing whether you mean how he is doing at the beginning of the query, at the end or in the extended period in the middle when you asked your darn question. Guys who respond to long greetings will often hesitate before answering and may renege on their first impulse (i.e. "I'm okay, I guess" or "Cool...sorta")If you really care about how a person is feeling, you'll say something like:

"What's up?"
"What's happening?"
"What's popping?"
"What's cracking?"

Shorten short greetings. Even in their abbreviated form, the above greetings may be considered too long for real guys. To use a math concept (dun dun duh!), the word "what" can be factored out of each of the above greetings to create a more economical and appealing "hello." Shorten these phrases to the following:

"S'up?"
"S'happening?"
"S'popping?"
"S'cracking?"

Create your own greeting. The "H" and "Y" sound in the English alphabet are categorized as greeting noises in the Dictionary of Guy. That's Y as in the Spanish "ll," for all you literalist linguists among the faithful few. You place any vowel sound after an "H" or "Y" and create a greeting. Although real guys will use the first vowel that pops to mind (in this context, Y is not a vowel), most utilize the following:

"Hey"
"Hi"
"Yo"
"Yeah"

Speak from below the diaphragm. My singing instructor advised to sing from the diaphragm to get the most pure tones. Guys need more than purity from their tones: they need toughness. In order to man-up their pipes, guys must marshal every ounce of diaphragm strength for their communication purposes. To the untrained ear, the result is a grunt-like sound. But to guys, it is a statement of manhood, sort of like advertising how much you bench press without having to wear a muscle shirt. To practice below the diaphragm speech, push all the air out of your lungs. All of it. There shouldn't even be a dimebag worth of space left. Yes, I just said dime bag. I was referring to Dimebag Darrell, the Damageplan guitarist who...didn't take up much space. What did you think I meant?

It took me so long to extricate myself from that mess that you probably need some more air so go ahead and breathe again. Unless, of course, you're a real man, in which case you probably haven't taken a breath since yesterday after dinner because you are preparing your body for a time when clean air is scarce and it what little consumable oxygen exists needs to be preserved for the women and children. Your altruism is to be praised. Exhale again. Remove all the excess air and then some. Now speak. Speak from the lowest tones possible and say something manly like:

"I never put down the toilet seat."
"Nancy Pelosi is a wuss."

Did you feel it? Did the testosterone pour over you like a water rebounding off a well executed cannon ball? Tonight you will sleep the deep sleep of a man. And tomorrow you will have hair on your chest.

You can go ahead and breath now.

Don't use pronouns. Pronouns are for females and English majors. But I'm being redundant. As proud carriers of a Y chromosome, we graduated from pronoun usage about the same time as the Native Americans. If you don't know what a pronoun is, you are a real man and can skip to the next section. If you do know what a pronoun is, you have been raised by a woman. I was informed by people I trust that a woman was present at my birth. From that moment, for about the next fifteen odd years, I did everything possible to escape women. For the past five years, that gender has become really interesting and rather than avoid contact, I'm finding that I'm actually seeking females out. This trajectory is typical among real guys. The danger, of course, is learning to use pronouns either very early in life or when communicating with females later on.

If you find yourself about to use a pronoun, just stop. Count to ten, light a fire on the kitchen table, do whatever you need to do to not say the word. It is better to be completely socially embarrassed - a state of being for many guys - than to actually utter a pronoun. There are a handful of nefarious exceptions. I've been trying to use that word all day, nefarious. Anyway, they are those wicked contradictions to the general rule that invariably form an impediment keeping the average Joe from becoming a guy. All too often, males go beyond the list of allowable pronouns and get themselves in trouble. What follows is an exhaustive list of acceptable pronouns:

"Man"
"Bro"
"Pilgrim" because that's what The Duke would say.

That's it! No more. You are a guy, not a dictionary. Leave the elaborate English for those who need to compensate for other deficiencies.

Talk slow. Fast talking is a dead giveaway for emasculinity. That's not "masculinity," as in so manly Matthew McConaughey blinks, nor is it "e-masculinity," which is my Facebook profile. Rather it is "emasculinity," as in "emasculated," as in the Reverend Jesse Jackson got a hold of you and decided to teach you a lesson about fatherhood. Spellcheck has a problem with the word "emasculinity," but it also doesn't like the word "spellcheck," so we'll call it even.

John Wayne was a real man. At least he became a real man at one point in his film career. He was actually born with a girl's first name and a half-decent middle name, but his little brother stole his middle name and he generally had a very estrogen intensive childhood. When the cameras started rolling, Marion Michael (or was it Robert) Wayne, jettisoned his feminine side and became a real man. The Duke also had some advice for any guy looking to man-up. He said "talk low, talk slow and don't talk much." Those are words to talk by.

If Wayne decided to read the above paragraph - an unlikely proposition given the number of activities the deceased movie star might settle for instead like roping a heifer and kissing a pretty woman - it would take him at least a minute. He might not even finish it because his voice would trail off into a gruff chuckle that leaves everyone confused but exposed to an awesome display of pure manliness.

There's more, of course. Guys talk from the side of their mouth, never emote and should think twice before issuing any thoughtful compliment beyond "you look nice." But I am reaching the acceptable word limit for my gender and will have to stay silent for the rest of the day just to stay below the quota. I hope you appreciate my sacrifice.