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He has his words when he wants to stress a point—but let me say 'man,' and you'd think I had committed the unpardonable sin.
What forms the counterculture is not only drug use, sexual abandon, rebellious fashion, and subversive politics, but the adaptation of a new language, one derived partially from minority slang. Alice rebels from her middle-class upbringing when she introduces words like "dig" to the family and identifies her father's academic vocabulary as "his" words. Just as each group of the population belongs to a different sphere, such as wealthy drug users and poor drug users, as Alice observes once, each one has its own specific language to reflect its lifestyle and values. In part, Alice's use of counter-cultural language is simply an offshoot of her own natural facility for expressive language, but it is also an attempt to try and describe her new experiences. As she learns, words are generally unable to describe drug trips, but this holds true for the counterculture as a whole; it is not a world based on communication, and she struggles to relate to the near-comatose drug users she meets. She eventually returns to the language she was brought up with, one that suits her and helps explain herself but with the memory of other languages she has spoken.

What forms the counterculture is not only drug use, sexual abandon, rebellious fashion, and subversive politics, but the adaptation of a new language, one derived partially from minority slang. Alice rebels from her middle-class upbringing when she introduces words like "dig" to the family and identifies her father's academic vocabulary as "his" words. Just as each group of the population belongs to a different sphere, such as wealthy drug users and poor drug users, as Alice observes once, each one has its own specific language to reflect its lifestyle and values. In part, Alice's use of counter-cultural language is simply an offshoot of her own natural facility for expressive language, but it is also an attempt to try and describe her new experiences. As she learns, words are generally unable to describe drug trips, but this holds true for the counterculture as a whole; it is not a world based on communication, and she struggles to relate to the near-comatose drug users she meets. She eventually returns to the language she was brought up with, one that suits her and helps explain herself but with the memory of other languages she has spoken.

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