Barbaric, backwards ancestor worship

NPR had a recording of a speech by Bess Truman immediately after Pearl Harbor over the weekend. I was struck by just how British, and snooty upper-class her pronunciation, speech patterns and vocabulary sounded. She was from Independence Missouri and was a very popular first lady. Can’t imagine the red state/populist backlash against a potential first lady with similar speech today?

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Trigger’s broom!

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That’s why I usually phrase it as “popularized” rather than “invented” (and that link is already in my second reply). :smile:

I’ll still call it a Shakespearean word though.

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“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary.” – James Nicoll

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If I choose to exploit my unlimited budget, that’s my choice. Spend, Spend, Spend!

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False Fronts in the Language Wars by Steven Pinker:

But the valid observation that there is nothing inherently wrong with ain’t should not be confused with the invalid inference that ain’t is one of the conventions of standard English. Dichotomizers have difficulty grasping this point, so I’ll repeat it with an analogy. In the United Kingdom, everyone drives on the left, and there is nothing sinister, gauche, or socialist about their choice. Nonetheless there is an excellent reason to encourage a person in the United States to drive on the right: That’s the way it’s done around here.

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Bullshit.

This is, or rather, was, the cipher–

(Without the supplements, it can’t claim to be complete.)

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You must admit that the cult has got some lovely temples.

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Is it so wrong to categorize people who say “nukuler”?

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Early English spelling was non-standard, but how many literate people would have confused the long s with “f”?

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Precisely.

Clearly Mr. Pinker is no Francophone because it isn’t possible for driving on the left to be anything other than gauche. :wink:

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What are you talking about here?

See also: sinister, socialist.

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I don’t quite understand it either.

To demand the immobilization of this restless, incontinent language is a form of barbaric and backwards ancestor-worship.

There’s also something to be said for standardization of language. Otherwise, this is what happens.

Thish-yer Smiley had a mare the boys called her the fifteen- minute nag, but that was only in fun, you know, because, of course, she was faster than that and he used to win money on that horse, for all she was so slow and always had the asthma, or the distemper, or the consumption, or something of that kind. They used to give her two or three hundred yards start, and then pass her under way; but always at the fag-end of the race she’d get excited and desperate- like, and come cavorting and straddling up, and scattering her legs around limber, sometimes in the air, and sometimes out to one side amongst the fences, and kicking up m-o-r-e dust, and raising m-o-r-e racket with her coughing and sneezing and blowing her nose and always fetch up at the stand just about a neck ahead, as near as you could cipher it down.

Language standards are what allow me, a hick from the Mid-South U.S., to communicate with someone I know who’s from northern England. Those standards are also what allow me to communicate with people via email, text, and so on, with people who are not native English speakers.

Ah mean, if I done wrote like I talked when I was a young’un, y’all’d think I was sum kinda dum hik. I figger I’d be in gud cump’ny. Well, it’s about 12 so I better warsh and wrench off fore I eat dinner.

This boades some strange erruption to our State.
Mar. Good now sit downe, & tell me he that knowes
Why this same strict and most obseruant Watch,
So nightly toyles the subiect of the Land,
And why such dayly Cast of Brazon Cannon
And Forraigne Mart for Implements of warre:
Why such impresse of Ship-wrights, whose sore Taske
Do’s not diuide the Sunday from the weeke,
What might be toward, that this sweaty hast
Doth make the Night ioynt-Labourer with the day:
Who is’t that can informe me?

But Ye Gods, when Charles Worley gave that hateful sermon about homosexuals, more time was spent on Boing Boing and other sites about how he said, “I’m aginnit” than about how he thought we ought to have a homosexual genocide!

Ladies and gentlemen, a living, lower-class English

Ladies and gentlemen, have another (don’t open that one at work)

“U fink I’m bothered?” The fuck is that?

This one is more relevant to the conversation, I think.

Yorkshire

Carolina Outer Banks

Appalachian. It’s kinda funny to me; my grandpa was from eastern Kentucky, and they sound a little like this; my dad’s family has been in Southern Illinois for over a century, but my grandpa still ended up with a little bit of an Appalachian accent. People in my family use the word “peckerwood”, for example.

Cajun, and people at a NS Acadian festival for comparison/contrast

New Zealand

Notice something about the Carolina one? The first word is “dingbatter”. If you don’t sound like them, you’re a dingbatter. Or the NZ video, where they talk about how they’re having fun with it, and think it’s hilarious to do that to migrants. Their vowel shift, completely different from the Great Lakes shift in North America, renders ‘knackered’ much as ‘naked’ sounds in the southeastern U.S.

Dialects aren’t just about rich people sorting out poor people; it’s also about being exclusionary. Trust me on this that, even within my home state…there are people who move to where I live that come from Cook and the surrounding counties, thinking they’ll get along fine. Once the locals hear that nasally tone and vowel shift, though…

The thing is…yeah, if you can understand each other, it’s not that big of a deal, is it? But it can get in the way as well.

And that gets into the ugly side of it. Look back at that New Zealand video, and how they complain that it’s not that they talk fast, it’s that everyone else is too slow. That maybe if the migrants can’t understand, maybe they should just go home.

We do that in the U.S., too; I’ve seen people switch to using a heavy local dialect with their doctors if they don’t like their blunt Indian doctor, or if they want to passive-aggressively make Mexicans feel unwelcome.

In college, I had to learn to drop the southern Illinois accent. The majority of students–and mind you, I was a local–were from northern Illinois. They assume you’re a cow-humping idiot if you have a drawl. If they’re a minority, they act like you’re a Klansman without his robe. If I used regional colloquialisms, people wouldn’t understand me, especially people who spoke English as a second language. Since the kids are couching everything as a privilege these days, I had to dump the local-boy…privilege? Nah, I can’t do that. I had to mask who I was, in order to make life easier for both others, and myself.

I mean, can you imagine if one of our Supreme Court Justices insisted on speaking only Gullah? That is Clarence Thomas’s first language, after all. But he’s a learned man, and one of the first things you learn is that you can’t just sound like a local yokel unless you want to be a local yokel your whole life.

And so, I paid close attention to Peter Jennings. Oh, the irony of a mid-South American trying to “perfect” his spoken American English by emulating someone from Ontario.

Oh, bullshit.

The fetishization of “correct” English – which is to say, white, wealthy English – is in direct opposition to everything that makes English such a glorious drunkard’s debauch of a language.

Reeks of white guilt. Which is weird, because, well, check out some of those videos I linked to.

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I try not to talk too much.

Does Arial have a long s? Answer, Yes: ſ Although frankly with NO crossbar instead of half a crossbar it looks less like a classical long s than the lower case f does.

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Just this.

When I taught, I told the students that I didn’t need to teach them English because they were already perfectly fluent in it. I was teaching them formal English so that they would be able to use it when necessary – in an office setting, or when otherwise dealing with bureaucrats. We would talk about how the “no swearing in class” rule wasn’t in place because swearing was inherently bad, but because they had to learn to control their vocabulary, and use words as best suited the situation. We had some fun listing all the places standard English wasn’t a good idea as well.

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What is this dead white mans language called html?
Why can’t I just mash it up a little - it would look far froodier with [imj] in place of [im_g] - oh fiddlsticks now my website does not work!!
Could it be that languages have formalities to improve understanding and universality?

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Well, yeah. But still and all, your quote only demonstrates that Cory used the word “white”; no guilt was stated or implied. Again, the ruling class in the UK is 100% white, and the working class — where these “improper” forms of English flourish — is over-represented by non-melanin-deficient people, especially in media. The youth who says “nuffink” or “innit” is as likely to be black or south Asian as white in the media, despite the proportions being skewed away from them in real life, and in either case is to be looked down on as not one of us, i.e. the establishment and their hangers-on.

But perhaps “white guilt” means something different to you than it does to me. Maybe you’d like to explain?

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