Over in the comments at Booker, I saw somethin that kinda caught my attention. The discussion over there is about the code switching (or the lack thereof) of the Obama family, kinda centering on President Obama’s use of the phrase, “Nah, we straight” when he was at Ben’s Chili Bowl. While I’m kinda interested in [...]
So I was thinking about some of what Dollar Bill said and to fully explore the idea, I figured it would work better if I ran it as a podcast..or two. Linguistic dialectical development Part 1
Having lived in a couple different regions of the US during fairly important stages in my development, I suppose it’s reasonable that my speech is a mishmash of regional dialects. Witness the following results on different informal accent surveys: Which American accent do you have? Southern People used to hate Southern accents but now everyone [...]
I use the word ‘nigga’ a lot. Some folks would say inordinately so. Recently while I had a pretty long drive, I tried to figure out why. But in writing about it publicly, I hafta kinda write some things out long-hand that I already know that undergird my usage. So allow me to spell it [...]
I don’t straight-out cosign nobody hardly, but one person who usually comes very close on the linguistic nuances of racial speech is Jeremy Pierce. In a recent post, he outlines his philosophy for giving people the benefit of the doubt when racism is possible but not clearly established. For the same reason that we don’t [...]
John Mark Reynolds has an extremely interesting post on politics vis a vis profanity. In it, he surmises: To paraphrase Senator Edwards, there are two Americas. There is the America where calling your opponent a (insert profanity here) freak is normal and the Other Places where it is not. Vulgar America is a place where [...]
Generally speaking, I’m about as much of a linguistic aprescriptivist as there can be. I generally try to focus more on the idea than the specific words, because in most cases, the idea is where the real action is. Me, I’d rather understand what the person who’s cussin is tryin to say than get caught [...]
I don’t think I mentioned the Mayweather-Hatton destruction last month, but I did watch it. I actually watched both of Pretty Boy Floyd’s fights last year. The first one wasn’t so impressive, but I couldn’t even front on him last month. He was good. And he won me some money. I had bet on a [...]
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