OK, white Americans, listen up

By -
One of the things I like about Kevin Ollie, UConn's men's basketball coach, is his unapologetic use of "black" English, his native dialect.

However, decades after linguists had shown that the idea is nonsense, I still hear complaints that black English is "ungrammatical." If you are inclined to think this is true, take a look at the following two sentences:

1) Man, these kids done a great job, and while I don't mean no disrespect to State U, our kids, they just got more heart than any other team.

2) Man, this kids have did a great job, and while I don't mean some disrespect to State U, our kids, they just gotten more heart than any other team.

You can immediately pick out which one is actual black English, and which one is a mangled imitation of it, right? You know why: because you've heard black English your whole life, and you know its grammar perfectly well. And that grammar is just as regular as that of "white" English, which is why it is easy to see when someone is writing or speaking it incorrectly. So cut it out with, "Why doesn't he learn to speak properly?" OK?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more