Relax Oliver

by Prometheus 6
December 14, 2004 - 8:48am.
on Race and Identity

No one is trying to force you to speak ebonics.

Your two threads are interesting.

But your commenter who says he can't find sentence structure in ebonics is full of it.

And this is a fact: language develops from the ground up. It's the reason new words are added to the dictionary regularly, the reason the meanings of phrases slip ("stink" originally had pleasant connotations).

It's hard to say someone is not speaking correctly when everyone (including you, Oliver) understands what they're saying. Furthermore, if you read the original historical documents, you'll find "proper English" is very, very new. The American nation, society and economy were created by people who couldn't spell worth a damn.

The "proper English" you extol is a trade language, like Swahili. It should be taught as such. And like any other skill it adds to your marketability. But "proper English"…like Chinese…has no more significance than that.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

There are a couple of very interesting threads about 'Ebonics' (African-American Vernacular English - AAVE) over at Oliver Willis' blog - "Acting White" & Reality - I Be Talking Good, Yo. It never ceases to amaze me how people, Oliver...

Submitted by Assamite (not verified) on December 15, 2004 - 3:51am.

When you say "Chinese", you ARE talking about Mandarin in relation to the various dialects of Chinese, right?

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on December 15, 2004 - 11:01am.

Okay, mea culpa. I asked the American stereotypes in the back of my head for "exotic languages you don't know" and came back with a stereotypical answer that is as incorrect as if I'd said the language was "African." And for unnamed reasons I should be just as unlikely to make the first error as the second.

Distance makes the ignorance grow stronger, I guess.