Bad English - Who cares?

In reviewing Michael Savage's Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt complained that the book is poorly written. I called it "not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants." That doesn't mean it's hard to read. Quite the opposite. It's written and edited (?) to a level which is comfortable for a reader of the New York Post or National Enquirer. You know. The ones whose lips move as they read.

If I were to calculate Stop the Coming Civil War 's Fog Index, I'd bet that the book would prove to have been edited to a reading ease level of Grade 7. That, sadly, is about right for your average American or Canadian. (It's hard to tell about the Brits. The gap between the educated and uneducated in the UK is much wider than that of English-speaking North America.)

Thoughtful people like Dr. Rudolf Flesch have been bemoaning the decline of educational standards in general, and reading in particular, for decades. Dr. Flesch's seminal work Why Johnny Can't Read appeared in 1955. He argued for a return to the phonetic (as opposed to ideographic) method of learning to read. But instead of teaching people to read better, our "educators" are now teaching people to write worse!

This thesis is put forward -- with qualified approval -- by Dr. John H. McWhorter, of UC Berkeley (where else?) in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003) -- winner of the Walt Whiteman Prize for Longest Book Title of that year.

Dr. John (as I'm sure he'd like to be known) is a musician cum linguist, or linguist cum musician, take your pick. He makes a good case that, in the hippy-dippy 60s, American English changed from being a written language to an oral language, written down the way it's spoken.

An extreme example -- Walt's, not Dr. John's -- would be the comparison of Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72. Just the style used to denote the year in the two titles makes the point. Since 1965 -- Dr. McWhorter is very precise about the year -- authors have started to write the way Americans talk... for better or worse.

Dr. McWhorter pinpoints 1965, the year following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation made it suddenly not just OK, but cool to be black. "African-Americans" (a term which would only come years later) no longer had to "act white" or "talk white" to be successful, particularly in the field of popular music. Nat King Cole was out; Aretha Franklin was in. "Black English" or "ebonics" (as progressives like Dr. John would have it) became not just acceptable but emulated by the white majority.

The result? People stopped trying to write stylish, grammatical English and started writing as they talk. This is particularly so with popular music. Try writing down the lyrics of hit songs of the last two decades, and comparing them with the words turned out by even the poorer Tin Pan Alley hacks of yesteryear.

Dr. McWhorter flirts with the notion (if not the word) of the degradation of American English. Walt would say "blackification", but of course that's not politically correct. The fact remains that even educated people, like the Prez, have adopted a less grammatical, more folksy style of speech -- "We's all jes folks heah in Nawlins!" -- and that style is reflected in much American writing, including that of Michael Savage, Ph.D.

Dr. McWhorter does not condemn the degradation of American English. He merely identifies the trend and predicts that it will continue. He's all, like, wassup wit dat? He's OK with it, y'know? Walt is not. Walt doesn't speak (or write) WalMart.

Footnote: Like Michael Savage (Ph.D.), John McWhorter (Ph.D.) could do with the services of an editor and fact-checker. "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Seuss", but then, "Suess" sounds more like the way the name is pronounced. Dr. McWhorter doesn't write very well either, but he would probably say that just proves his point.

Further reading: "Book Review: John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing", Wordorigins, June 2004.

Was Rachel Jeantel speaking "Black English" or "Ebonics" or what?

The first thing we must do is identify Rachel Jeantel for those who weren't following the Trayvon Martin controversy closely. Rachel is a BBW from the `hood, and was on the phone with Trayvon Martin at the time of the confrontation with George Zimmerman at the end of which Trayvon was dead. She was thus the prosecution's star witness at Mr. Zimmerman's trial.

If you search "Rachel Jeantel" on YouTube, you can find Ms. Jeantel's testimony in its entirety. But will you be able to understand what she's saying? Counsel for the defence made much of the fact that he was having difficulty doing so. His many requests for repetition or clarification of what she said were seen by some as an attempt to denigrate [No puns, please. Ed.] her intelligence/education/integrity.

In other words, the defence was accused of racism, of trying to discredit Ms. Jeantel and her testimony based on who she was and how she spoke. Among those hollering "racism" was John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics and editor of the ultra-liberal New Republic. Interviewed on "All In" by the very PC Chris Hayes, Prof. McWhorter asserted that Ms Jeantel was merely speaking "Black English", and very articulately too. If her answers weren't clear to the judge and the jury, it was because they were "crackers", the whole lot of them.

But is there such a thing as "Black English"? If so, is it a generally acceptable part of "the linguistic bounty that is America" (to quote Hayes)? Prof. McWhorter declined to debate the issue on Fox News, but Jehmu Green and Brian Benjamin, both persons of colour, had at it. Here's what they had to say.



Mr. Benjamin said there's no such thing as "Black English". Ms. Green adopted Jesse Jackson's characterization of the "language" as a "garbage dialect". Whatever "Black English" may be, she said, "it's not a language that's going to get you to graduate from high school, to go to college, to find a job, or to keep a job."

As you watch the video, you can't help but be impressed by both debaters' command of proper English. (I was tempted to write "the Queen's English", but hey, it's America.) They don't speak "Black English", at least not on TV.

Nor is "Black English" the mangled language misused by Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll in the old (and very politically incorrect) radio and TV sitcom, Amos 'n' Andy. Messrs. Gosden and Correll were white actors who wrote and spoke in the artificial "dialect" of the minstrel show tradition -- a caricature of the way American blacks really spoke, even back in the day.

Back in the 60s, "linguistics experts" like Prof. McWhorter coined another label for the "language" they now call "Black English". They called it "Ebonics", and defined it as African-American Vernacular English, "a distinctive lect of English spoken by many African-Americans". There's a book about it -- Ebonics, the True Language of Black Folks -- but that doesn't make it a language.

What is "Ebonics" then? The Urban Dictionary calls it "a poor excuse for a failure to grasp the basics of english [sic]. When in doubt, throw an "izzle" sound in the middle of any word of just string random thoughts together and insinuate that they actually mean something. When backed into a corner, you can always claim that it has something to do with a sort of symbolism or is a defining trait that makes your race great, versus own up to the fact that it is essentially laziness at it's [sic]finest.

Ms. Jeantel wasn't speaking "Ebonics", nor was she speaking "Black English". What Ms. Jeantel speaks is the idiom of the `hood, the language spoken by poor blacks -- and white and Latinos -- who grow up in certain parts of American cities. It is not the language used by the likes of Ms. Green and Mr. Benjamin, or Prof. McWhorter. It is that of folks who are poor and uneducated and happy to remain the latter if not the former. It doesn't mean they're bad folks or dumb folks, only that they are what they are -- members of a distinct and growing American underclass.