Discourse communities are groups of people that gather together to accomplish the same goal or have some common purpose. These communities sometimes have some sort of secret language, a mystery to any outsider. This can range from an inside joke to a random saying someone uses with a random meaning. These cohorts can help accomplish goals or just mess around. A discourse community I joined in around high school had a word we would all use “cap”. Now cap stood for bullshit or lying, both fit the definition since it means the same thing. With phrases like “capping”, “no cap”, and “stop the cap” being used heavily especially in an environment where if you got caught shouting bullshit at someone you will get in trouble or just told to not say that, depending on the teacher or who hears. I noticed the term being used more Junior year to everyone using it some type of way Senior year. Now my discourse community started in freshman year with no one knowing we would fall into the same technology program the school had offered. The first members of the discourse communities formed because of a math class we had and seeing each other at least in another class. This math teacher made watching paint dry seem like a day at six flags. The best part about the class was it brought us together and that it ended. I personally believe the ending was the best part. The rest of the group came together in sophomore year when we all were given the same class at different times. This allowed for everyone to start meeting other people and expanding the community. Our school building had six schools inside, but they didn’t really allow any of us to mingle. We’ll I was in a zoned school so it made sense since some of the students would just wander the halls and yell absurdities in the classroom. Sometimes it was funny, but other times the teacher would make a big deal and halt the lesson to deal with them. But I digress, the word cap was introduced first in a lunchroom when one of the members blurted out the phrase when someone starting talking about what they claimed to be facts. The song “no cap” by future and young thug came out that year so we all knew what it meant, but this is the first time most of us heard it used in a conversation and as it got used more and more we found our vocabularies adapting the word into our speech patterns. Now this word unlike others we use didn’t signify an inside joke or meaning only we knew since it came from a song. Well most of our words didn’t have a deeper meaning behind them except a few, but we stopped using them as the events behind them became a distant memory and most of us forgotten. Junior year is also when we started hanging out more frequently bringing the community closer and adding more slang to the group vocabulary. This was good for me since I knew no slang words at the time and I only use a few now, but this helped me understand the bizarre phrases I heard around the school. Senior year was a cakewalk for us. Some of our members handed in most of the work last minute but still managed to scrape by. I was surprisingly not one of them. Senior year was when another term got added that is still used, but I will not talk about it any more than this mention since it involves me and I think it’s messed up even though I use it the most out of anyone in the group. Anyway, this year made us rapidly choose colleges when most of us weren’t thinking that far ahead, and only one of us who had AP English already had a college essay ready. I know a lot of people who were told one thing about their colleges like tuition and stuff and when they actually got in they were given a different story. The main point about the high school is that it was trash and those who were more independent were able to actually pull through. I’m not sure how many people reading this know what east side house is but it’s basically where all the kids in my school who were falling behind were given the stuff to do the work regular kids were doing. I was put into it once because my parents gave the school no notification they were planning something during my class time and pulled me out for like a week and then when east side house got to me they gave me food for showing up to school. Again I digress because I did not have a fun time in that school. Now when college came I had to go about finding a new discourse community since everyone went to different colleges. I winded up finding this other discourse community in a class that seemed easy, but the teacher would yell and try to stress the importance of fast math on stuff she just taught. This community was formed because three of us knew and understood the material that was getting thrown at us better than the rest and we even shared the tools needed for labs. Now, this discourse community kinda died down since covid and a lot of people changing their majors. Now the original community I was in has formed again over online and the college one stood empty due to no one playing together or talking. Well, I can’t really say stood empty a text flies out every now and again.