"Dude", "bro", "awesome": what do you think?

[Scottish Lass]

So, you will not teach Grace that there is a correct way for her to write the word color/colour or flavor/flavour, etc? You will let her decide?

I'll teach her that both are correct. She'll see the more frequent spelling in books, mostly, but I don't think either version is wrong, so "a correct way" doesn't exactly fit.

 

[Semper Fidelis]

In Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, "The Gift of Language" Theodore Dalrymple describes what he has observed of the result of years of teaching English in a non-prescriptive fashion:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.
In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course it was not my mastery of language along that produced this result; rather my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents.
(...)
Beginning in the 1950s, Basil Bernstein, a London University researcher, demonstrated the difference between the speech of middle- and working-class children, controlling for whatever it is that IQ measures. Working-class speech, tethered closely to the here and now, lacked the very aspects of standard English needed to express abstract or general ideas and to place personal experience in temporal or any other perspective. Thus, unless Pinker's despised schoolmarms were to take the working-class children in hand and deliberately teach them another speech code, they were doomed to remain where they were, at the bottom of a society that was itself much the poorer for not taking full advantage of their abilities, and that indeed would pay a steep penalty for not doing so. An intelligent man who can make no constructive use of his intelligence is likely to make a destructive, and self-destructive, use of it.

We're collectively sort of shifting the discussion. I think it's possible to use slang terms and have a rich vocabulary and the use of slang does not, in itself, mean that one is mimicking a person that has a poor vocabulary or glorifying those that do.

I started to really reflect on the issue you quoted a few years ago when I was living in Japan. I had never really considered the link between language and development until a friend of mine brought up a concern she had.

In Okinawa there's a school called Okinawa Christian School International (OCSI). When it started, decades ago, it served a valuable missionary purpose given the poverty of the island but now it's sort of supported by Westerners who sort of "pay in" to being a missionary and teach at the school and my friend, who had taught there, was concerned it was actually harming and not helping the students in the long run.

Words are really symbols for ideas and, as we progress educationally, we ought to be filling minds with more and more ideas that will have words to give them expression. Her concern was that OCSI neither teaches mostly Okinawan children enough English to convey enough of a vocabulary nor Japanese for the same purpose. In other words, if I am well trained in one language then I can take that knowledge of ideas that have words associate with them and bridge into another language that might have different words but the same basic colllection of ideas. The less vocabulary I have, the less ability I have to communicate propositions in any language. Because the students learn poor English and aren't in Japanese schools where they learn Japaneses, the students are impoverished by such an education.

Sadly, this is where a lot of people are in the United States. It is not merely a problem for the "ghetto" but many people have an undeveloped vocabulary and are therefore undeveloped intellectually. I found this particularly relevant as, in a recent discussion, it was pointed out how many concepts have come into our vocabulary from the Christian religion. There are ideas that are Scriptural that are nearly impossible to convey in other languages because, culturally, the language has been impoverished by idolatry.

 

[he beholds]

So, you will not teach Grace that there is a correct way for her to write the word color/colour or flavor/flavour, etc? You will let her decide?

I'll teach her that both are correct. She'll see the more frequent spelling in books, mostly, but I don't think either version is wrong, so "a correct way" doesn't exactly fit.

For me, when I am teaching my kids how to spell, I will teach them the American way. When they are older and find the English word somewhere, I will then explain it.

 

[Scottish Lass]

So, you will not teach Grace that there is a correct way for her to write the word color/colour or flavor/flavour, etc? You will let her decide?

I'll teach her that both are correct. She'll see the more frequent spelling in books, mostly, but I don't think either version is wrong, so "a correct way" doesn't exactly fit.

For me, when I am teaching my kids how to spell, I will teach them the American way. When they are older and find the English word somewhere, I will then explain it.

I'll probably do the same; that's different than teaching that one is correct while another is not.

 

[Montanablue]

Well, in Britain, if you spell color without the u, they mark your papers down. I learned that the hard way!

 

[py3ak]

The portion I quoted doesn't make this explicit, but Dalrymple is speaking about how the decline of teaching children the "correct" way to speak has resulted in a decline in their ability to think; at least most of the essay can be read on Amazon.com with the look inside feature. That result is somewhat ironic, because the argument was that you couldn't tell natives that they spoke incorrectly - doing so was an affront to their self-esteem and a way to keep them in subordination.
While I realize the descriptivist/prescriptivist debatecan be complex, and is often polarized, I think it ought to be acknowledged that the prescriptivist approach is a pedagogical necessity. Pinker's statement (Dalrymple's foil) that language "is qualitatively the same in every individual" and consequently correcting someone's speech is unnecessary is patent nonsense.

 

[Gloria]

[/COLOR]

Afta listenin' ta dat hippidy-hop muzic I only gots ghetto jibba-jabba comin' out ma grill!

You guys can't be serious with some of this stuff...why are these kind of jokes okay? Who exactly are you mimicking? Who do you have in mind? Is it appropriate or godly to do this? Answers desired.

For the most part I am mimicking (to use your wording) the caricature of "hood" talk, or a certain caricatured vernacular, in direct response to the opening post which asserted that the evangelical community adopts certain vernacular from the ghetto. The assertion itself was humorous to me because I thought it was kind of silly. There is not a specific group of people in mind in the sentence you highlighted. To be candid, I find no problem with it when done in good nature, and I find no biblical argument against it; so yes, it can be appropriate and godly to do this. Although I will say that I apologize if I offended you, sister; however, I do believe that whatever fault you seem to find with my statement is either because of a misunderstanding, such as not knowing my motives, or an issue of personal preference.

Have a blessed Lord's day.

Yes, I was offended...and shocked. I probably wouldn't have posted anything had someone chimed in but no one had by the time I decided to post a response.

What is "hood" talk? Who lives in the "hood"? Wouldn't it be more genuine to say, "I'm mocking black people and/or people from a different socioeconomic background and/or culture from my own."

I don't really see how this conversation can advance if you think what you typed can be appropriate and godly. You are right in saying I don't know your motives. I don't see what this has to do with "personal preference." I'm going to finish reading the thread and then venture back into lurk mode. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

 

[LawrenceU]

In Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline, "The Gift of Language" Theodore Dalrymple describes what he has observed of the result of years of teaching English in a non-prescriptive fashion:

With a very limited vocabulary, it is impossible to make, or at least to express, important distinctions and to examine any question with conceptual care. My patients often had no words to describe what they were feeling, except in the crudest possible way, with expostulations, exclamations, and physical displays of emotion. Often, by guesswork and my experience of other patients, I could put things into words for them, words that they grasped at eagerly. Everything was on the tip of their tongue, rarely or never reaching the stage of expression out loud. They struggled even to describe in a consecutive and logical fashion what had happened to them, at least without a great deal of prompting. Complex narrative and most abstractions were closed to them.
In their dealings with authority, they were at a huge disadvantage—a disaster, since so many of them depended upon various public bureaucracies for so many of their needs, from their housing and health care to their income and the education of their children. I would find myself dealing on their behalf with those bureaucracies, which were often simultaneously bullying and incompetent; and what officialdom had claimed for months or even years to be impossible suddenly, on my intervention, became possible within a week. Of course it was not my mastery of language along that produced this result; rather my mastery of language signaled my capacity to make serious trouble for the bureaucrats if they did not do as I asked. I do not think it is a coincidence that the offices of all those bureaucracies were increasingly installing security barriers against the physical attacks on the staff by enraged but inarticulate dependents.
(...)
Beginning in the 1950s, Basil Bernstein, a London University researcher, demonstrated the difference between the speech of middle- and working-class children, controlling for whatever it is that IQ measures. Working-class speech, tethered closely to the here and now, lacked the very aspects of standard English needed to express abstract or general ideas and to place personal experience in temporal or any other perspective. Thus, unless Pinker's despised schoolmarms were to take the working-class children in hand and deliberately teach them another speech code, they were doomed to remain where they were, at the bottom of a society that was itself much the poorer for not taking full advantage of their abilities, and that indeed would pay a steep penalty for not doing so. An intelligent man who can make no constructive use of his intelligence is likely to make a destructive, and self-destructive, use of it.

We're collectively sort of shifting the discussion. I think it's possible to use slang terms and have a rich vocabulary and the use of slang does not, in itself, mean that one is mimicking a person that has a poor vocabulary or glorifying those that do.

I started to really reflect on the issue you quoted a few years ago when I was living in Japan. I had never really considered the link between language and development until a friend of mine brought up a concern she had.

In Okinawa there's a school called Okinawa Christian School International (OCSI). When it started, decades ago, it served a valuable missionary purpose given the poverty of the island but now it's sort of supported by Westerners who sort of "pay in" to being a missionary and teach at the school and my friend, who had taught there, was concerned it was actually harming and not helping the students in the long run.

Words are really symbols for ideas and, as we progress educationally, we ought to be filling minds with more and more ideas that will have words to give them expression. Her concern was that OCSI neither teaches mostly Okinawan children enough English to convey enough of a vocabulary nor Japanese for the same purpose. In other words, if I am well trained in one language then I can take that knowledge of ideas that have words associate with them and bridge into another language that might have different words but the same basic colllection of ideas. The less vocabulary I have, the less ability I have to communicate propositions in any language. Because the students learn poor English and aren't in Japanese schools where they learn Japaneses, the students are impoverished by such an education.

Sadly, this is where a lot of people are in the United States. It is not merely a problem for the "ghetto" but many people have an undeveloped vocabulary and are therefore undeveloped intellectually. I found this particularly relevant as, in a recent discussion, it was pointed out how many concepts have come into our vocabulary from the Christian religion. There are ideas that are Scriptural that are nearly impossible to convey in other languages because, culturally, the language has been impoverished by idolatry.

Anyone want to toss a little Chomsky in here and get going on Transformational Grammar?

 

[awretchsavedbygrace]

What is "hood" talk? Who lives in the "hood"? Wouldn't it be more genuine to say, "I'm mocking black people and/or people from a different socioeconomic background and/or culture from my own."

Gloria, this isn't a race thing. But to answer your question, all sorts of people live in the hood; Black, White, Hispanic, Middle Eastern. The usage of ebnics does not only pertain to African Americans. I use to live in the hood, and I sometimes still speak in that way, I can see the humor in it.

By the way, Andrew grew up in the hood too, we call him B-rabbit. =)

 

[AThornquist]

Yes, I was offended...and shocked. I probably wouldn't have posted anything had someone chimed in but no one had by the time I decided to post a response.

What is "hood" talk? Who lives in the "hood"? Wouldn't it be more genuine to say, "I'm mocking black people and/or people from a different socioeconomic background and/or culture from my own."

I don't really see how this conversation can advance if you think what you typed can be appropriate and godly. You are right in saying I don't know your motives. I don't see what this has to do with "personal preference." I'm going to finish reading the thread and then venture back into lurk mode. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

No. It wouldn't be genuine to say I'm mocking black people or people of a "different kind." If you don't think this conversation can proceed, then so be it.

What is "hood" talk? Who lives in the "hood"? Wouldn't it be more genuine to say, "I'm mocking black people and/or people from a different socioeconomic background and/or culture from my own."

Gloria, this isn't a race thing. But to answer your question, all sorts of people live in the hood; Black, White, Hispanic, Middle Eastern. The usage of ebnics does not only pertain to African Americans. I use to live in the hood, and I sometimes still speak in that way, I can see the humor in it.

By the way, Andrew grew up in the hood too, we call him B-rabbit. =)

Thanks for entering the discussion mang; as we both know, you and I have common ground in this regard. Some boys waste their paper on girls and spinners while we rep the risen Christ who makes saints outta sinners. B-rabbit out.

 

[DMcFadden]

Anyay intelligentyay anmay owhay ancay akemay onay onstructivecay useyay ofyay ishay intelligenceyay isyay ikelylay otay akemay ayay estructiveday, andyay elf-destructivesay, useyay ofyay ityay.

Which seems to prove Dalrymple's point quite nicely!

Ouch!

[you do realize that the Dialectizer did the work and that I did not actually rewrite that very long quote, don't you?]

 

[Pergamum]

The key to communication is...well, communication. The greek of the New Testament writers is not the highest.


A related issue:


The Wycliffe Bible Translators are translating the Bible into Creole (Patois) and this has caused similar controversy:

Translation Tiff | Christianity Today | A Magazine of Evangelical Conviction


Wycliffe UK blog » Jamaican Patois

Wycliffe UK blog » Jamaican Patois

 

[Jared]

Being called that where I came from was liable to cause a fight. I still have that connotation stuck in my head.

Which is also a result of the cultural vernacular from your area, homie.

Will you also condemn the useage of internetisms like "lol"? That's the same thing, albeit typed

(On second thought, no one answer that.)

Oh, I wasn't condemning it. I was making the point that we all have a vernacular with which we speak and listen. It is shaped by the culture in which we are raised and live. Some aspects of it appear to be moldable, while others not so much. That is one reason that we must be gracious in these sort of dealings. Yet, I do believe that popular media is more of a factor in shaping vernacular than anything else at the present time. I think this may be what is causing a coarsening of common speech.

I have some cousins that live out west in California, Nevada, and Colorado. They say "right on" all the time. If you tell them you're going to go do something they'll say, "Right on". But, when I say that here in East Tennessee, people just give me a strange look and ask me what I just said.

 

[py3ak]

Anyay intelligentyay anmay owhay ancay akemay onay onstructivecay useyay ofyay ishay intelligenceyay isyay ikelylay otay akemay ayay estructiveday, andyay elf-destructivesay, useyay ofyay ityay.

Which seems to prove Dalrymple's point quite nicely!

Ouch!

[you do realize that the Dialectizer did the work and that I did not actually rewrite that very long quote, don't you?]

I figured you must have some way of doing that sort of thing very quickly, like a pig lating macro in your word processor.

 

[jwright82]

Yes, I was offended...and shocked. I probably wouldn't have posted anything had someone chimed in but no one had by the time I decided to post a response.

What is "hood" talk? Who lives in the "hood"? Wouldn't it be more genuine to say, "I'm mocking black people and/or people from a different socioeconomic background and/or culture from my own."

I don't really see how this conversation can advance if you think what you typed can be appropriate and godly. You are right in saying I don't know your motives. I don't see what this has to do with "personal preference." I'm going to finish reading the thread and then venture back into lurk mode. Thank you for taking the time to respond.

I hate to get all philosophical and all but I think I can help you out here. The concept of "hood-talk" need not describe any particulier group at all, in fact it can be (and probably is?) a language-game that has its own internal rules of meaning, or the use of certian words and phrases is understood by the speakers and hearers (readers). This means that it doesn't have to reflect a certian group or people to have meaning, the old way of viewing language, it only has to have meaningful usefullness. My brothers were listening to a song the other day, I was trapped in their car at their musical mercy (or lack thereof...), and I had no idea what the person was talking about because I am not cognizant of that particulier language-game at all, thank God.

 

[nwink]

For words like "awesome," I tend to use them to describe things that truly are deserving of awe...instead of using the word flippantly/casually.

 

[pepper]

Bro

I knew a pastor who would sign cards and books using the word "bro". He was doing that back in the 1970's. I agree with Paul the Apostle. Be all things to all men where they are, yet without sin.

 

[EverReforming]

Dude, this thread is wack, yo.

Right on.