DISCUSSION OF VULGAR LANGUAGE (CONTINUED)
People who highly value the proper use of “good English” might not be pleased with the presence of Ebonic jive words, street phrases, or style of speech (including vocal inflections and intonations) but some of us–laymen and scholars alike–recognize it as a necessary by-product of a healthy and creative language like English.
Languages must change little-by-little anyway, day by day, depending on how people speak to one another, the level of technological development, etc. A language should be as flexible as possible and in this regard English has long been considered one of the world’s great languages–from the time of Shakespeare, certainly, if not earlier.
Yes, these street jive phrases and vulgarisms remain in orbit but they are relatively few in number and do not form the heart of any language, old or new. The frequency of their use is not a fair indicator of the strength, beauty, and majesty of the entire language. The abuse of such obscenities among some people is much more a revealing glimpse into their moral character than it is an accurate reflection upon the beautiful nature of English itself.
Lazy people tend to use the same expressions over and over again, whether obscene or colloquial; it is frequently remarked that the children who do the least amount of school work, are the ones who most often rely on these ungrammatical constructions and vulgar words. Those students with the worst self-discipline and the weakest desire to improve themselves will make the most frequent mistakes in writing and speaking. It’s a simple truism, generation after generation.
They often begin to rely on slang and obscenity as common speech in their daily lives in place of classroom language. For some kids, teens, and even adults, using forbidden language has a deliberately defiant air of anti-social posturing to it. Relying on street lingo not only helps to cover up their academic deficiencies but it creates a shock value as well–even though reliance on vulgar four-letter words is repulsive to others and seen as a poorly-made crutch upon which to lean.
It’s one thing to recognize street slang as a necessary part of a living, breathing vibrant language like English. It’s quite another to lump together simple grammatical mistakes with street jive and say: upon such a foundation of vulgar, error-filled speech a new language shall be born!
To me, that is Insanity itself being crowned king of the world.
It’s a mistake, through and through–but more of that at a later date!
Postscript
The “th” sound (tongue thrust forward between the teeth) which many Europeans and English speakers take for granted as God-given, is missing in many African language families, especially those of West Africa from wherein came most of the slaves bound and chained for the New World.
Even making allowances for how slaves, fearful for their lives, marred their speech deliberately to hide their intelligence, the survival of “dat” for “that” suggests something more. It may very well be that the absence of the “th” sound in Africa made the first slaves pronounce (or mispronounce) such English words beginning with “th” in a manner more comfortable to them, becoming afterward a generational inheritance with a unique adaptation handed down from parent to child.
This linguistic by-product, a clash of two cultures and two ways of life, apparently has survived down to our own present day–and we are a century-and-a-half past the end of slavery. Still, despite the endless racism, segregation, and discrimination, many Black people managed to receive a fairly decent education in the last hundred-and-fifty years, since the end of the Civil War.
That it was a terrific struggle and a dangerous uphill battle to overcome all the great obstacles and racist violence placed in their way goes without saying. It took great courage and determination for many African-Americans to acquire the kind of education others took for granted. It is one of the reasons so many excelled because their needs, desires, and determination far exceeded the passion of all others not raising themselves from the fires of hell of slavery.
However limited and segregated their educational facilities were at first, many Black students took advantage of whatever opportunities they could find to learn and master proper English–as many did. They say and spell and write words that begin with “th” the same as any other English speaker.
They showed the world what is possible when students apply themselves to the task at hand. They need no excuses made for them for they never intended to achieve less than their best and comparable to the successes of any other students, no matter the difference in humble origins.
Yes, “d” for “th” continues to survive, causing us to ask if this has anything to do with their African heritage? And even if it does, the harder question remains: can enough unique African linguistic elements be identified to justify the creation of a new language–a new dialect–a new language spoken by inner-city Blacks? Should we allow ourselves to be propelled towards a linguistic separation of the races? In a democratic society, with its affirmation of equality and human rights for all . . . Is Ebonics friend or foe?
EBONICS: FRAUD OR HOAX? (THE INSIDE STORY)
DRAWBACKS AND PLUSSES
People who speak Ebonics could succeed in having it declared a foreign language or at least entitled to further development and instruction based on funds set aside for foreign language programs. If successful, student grades in Regular English may remain low but their scores in Ebonics as a Foreign Language could skyrocket!
A white person traveling in Ebonics community would need to go to Information Booths or hire Black-Guides. Here, bi-lingual translators will help them find their way about. Possibly Ebonics will want its own currency and then visitors would have to exchange Ebonics money for U.S. dollars as they go in and out of Ebonics-dominated areas. Ebonic phone-operators would keep a page of most frequently asked questions right by the computer so as to speed-forward calls:
“Lemme speak homey gomey diggo meo” means “Please connect me to my friend gomey diggo meo”, you see? If certain schools start using local speech as dialect, we may have a little confusion after a car accident. Different neighborhood dialects will clash and misunderstandings abound!
Overheard: “You no good m—-r f—-r, look what you did!” meant a sudden prayer service in the middle of the accident after two cars wrecked, as a god named M-th-r F-ck-r was appealed to for justice. No doubt you will hear this prayer to God nearly everywhere in Ebonic-land…except at a church where apparently it is forbidden to say the name of the most holy of Holies aloud!
No “F” words in church when the reverend and the people meet and all is holy, or almost so.
Black people in America speak English differently from those who speak it differently from them. This gave rise to the New Dialect/Religion/Music. Of course! In the days of Slavery the Ebonic word “Massa” was preferred to the English word “Master”. If this doesn’t prove Ebonics is a genuine dialect, I don’t know what does!
“Yassuh” and “No-suh” are Ebonic for . . . well here the translation is difficult; we’re still working on these two. After all, speakers of a dialect can hardly make themselves understood to the older parent-language speakers. That’s because Black slaves delighted in saying words their own way.
Ignorance was safer than knowledge; playing dumb was safer than resisting. Slaves mispronounced a whole bunch of words just about as far as the human mind could take them without making the words totally unrecognizable, and sometimes even beyond.
Linguistic accidents do happen and then new words and phrases SPRING into life on their own and go whirling down the street talking up a storm and pretty soon everybody catches on to how hip the new way is / especially compared to how uncool the old way of speaking was.
To be hip you have to study Ebonics since you have to study language, although this one you don’t have to study because you already know it from the way you came up street-talking it, kind of like a rapper being given college credit for a song about how great life is when all you need is wine, money, sex, money, song and more money and some drugs and more money and more sex plus you tell your listeners like wow act crazy it’s cool and since Ebonics is cool then a good rap song from the street practically equals a degree from a prestigious college. You have arrived in your limo!
Ebonics could become college-dominant, street-dominant, and world-dominant: the next official language of the whole world! English as spoken by teachers in schools then dwindles until it becomes the dialect and eventually only scholars with a taste for rare ancient tongues will know how to speak it. Kind of like Latin which people used to know until they stopped speaking it.
A white teacher teaching a Black Ebonics child will have to re-train for a revised bi-lingual credential in “Talk of the Street” or “Feet-Rapping-Beat-Talk.” She or he will have to learn how to mispronounce and misspell words, how to use double and triple negatives, how to pray frequently to the Ebonic Gods of “You know” and “i dunno” and “huh?” and all the others deities and how to make just enough mistakes in every sentence to qualify for true Ebonics fluency!
A dialect born of mistakes! It’s fascinating material for a remake of certain science fiction movies:
“The Day the Earth stood Still” becomes “The Day the Earth Done Stopped Movin’!”
“Star Trek: the Next Generation” would be renamed “Party Time for Aliens from Hip Galactic Ghettoes”. “The Twilight Zone” will be-retitled “The Light It Up Zone.” Yes, picture the first alien astronauts landing on earth and Pseudo-Humanoid Life Forms emerging from their vessels, already trained to speak Earth Ebonics and greeted by a street-wise earth man who speaks first:
“Hey bro’, my main man, my homey, what’s up, what’s up?”
And the alien points to the sky and says:
“Dat’s right! Ol’ mean Jack Galactic Time-Traveling Fool hisself is back, Watch out now!”
Ebonics, the all-conquering language of Aliens, is here!!
God’s speed, Ebonics speakers!!!
Don’t be dishin’ no trash on dis here pile of words now dat I dun finished laying down the true skinny for y’all, you hear? You better dig it while the digging is good!
P.S.
I suppose one can imagine a Black student out of Oakland becoming bi-lingual, speaking both Ebonics and English. One can even imagine Black students starting high school and getting together to talk over possible electives. One might say: “I need a foreign language, so I think I’ll take English.” For if Ebonics becomes recognized as a separate dialect, then it follows that, in time, English should be considered a second, or foreign, language. “Dat be cool!” and “That is great!” would actually represent a new level of bi-lingual bi-cultural achievement.
Rather than seeing the first phrase “Dat be cool” as mispronounced or grammatically incorrect (as we used to) we will come to see it as the living, breathing vital energy force accompanying the birth of a brand new dialect. “Dat be cool” wouldn’t it be?
Instead of chastising students for errors, we take the errors and mix them into the foundation of this brand new lingo coming bravely into being straight from the streets!
Hopefully, someone will come up with a more fitting name for it than the flat, insipid word “Ebonics”. It sounds too much like the name for a laxative!
