Nick later taught both Aaron and Sam how to play the guitar, and the roommates recently bought Sam a guitar for his birthday. They pitched in to buy Nick a guitar, too, a beautiful green “dream guitar” he’d had his eye on for years. They presented it to him at a surprise 21st birthday party in a New York club.

“Music just brings so much light to the room,” Sam says.

They planned to have a farewell concert—perhaps on the roof of the Quincy library—but on this Thursday they haven’t started practicing and Sam can’t believe they’ll be playing later that night.

He runs upstairs to collapse on one of the many common room couches, picks a basketball off the floor and begins tossing it.

“This is such a reality,” he exclaims.

That’s one of the roommates’ typical phrases, part of a dialect that started in Sam and Chris’s hometown of Jamaica Plain and has evolved in Quincy House.

Chris was originally in the Class of 2002—he hosted Sam as a prefrosh, and jokingly claims himself responsible for his childhood friend’s decision to come to Harvard—but took a year off to travel to Spain and the Dominican Republic.

When he returned, Chris transferred from Pforzheimer House to Sam’s rooming group in Quincy. For Chris, who was used to traveling to the river to see his friends, living in a large group has been a welcome change.

“In Pfoho, I didn’t really have a crew,” he says. “In this room, I can come back and ask, ‘what do you guys want to do?’ It feels much more like a home when I come into my room.”

Part of that feeling of home is the ever-changing lingo that Chris and Sam brought from Jamaica Plain to Harvard. The word “such” is an important piece. Statements like “He’s such a guy,” or “He’s such a kid,” or “This is such a reality” pepper the room’s speech.

“It’s kind of hard to explain and you have to use it in context,” Chris says. The word “such” is “mildly negative, and it has everything to do with intonation.”

Each word has its own, often inexplicable, evolution.

For instance, the roommates use the word “face,” meaning roughly, “to fight.” Originally, “fizz” was the way to say “to fight.” But one of Chris’s friends from Spain tried to use the lingo and mispronounced “fizz” as “face.” This amused Chris so much that “fizz” became “face.”

Few of these words have official parts of speech and many of them are somewhat interchangeable.

The roommates also often insert the letters “ier” into a word. This is particularly useful in curses, Justin notes—like “fierck,” for instance—because it softens statements that could otherwise sound harsh or hurtful.