The Golden Rule of Dialects

[Beverly Flanigan]

I was tempted to accept Dave's explanation, until I read the cite on the
"King of Fink" (or whatever he's called), dating from 1964, as well as the
faraway cites from the NYTimes etc.  It may be that our colleague
transferred a phrase that had been in the wind to the matter of dialect
preference--perhaps only semi-conscious of the spreading phrase.
Logically, I'd bet the modified version has been around in some form or
other for about 2000 years!


At 01:52 PM 5/18/99 -0400, you wrote:
>I just had lunch with Bev's colleague--the one who claims to have invented
the
>golden rule--and he said that he had had a class w/Walt Wolfram at Indiana
>before coming to Ohio in '72 and devised "The Golden Rule of Dialects" which
>is "he who has the gold speaks the best dialect."  I challenged him as to
>whether he might have gotten the original witticism from The Wizard of Id and
>modified it, but no, he said they had studied Labov on social differentiation
>of dialects and he had invented it whole hog in order to make the "x has the
>best [or worst] dialect" discussion comprehensible to undergraduates.
>
>-- db
>___________________________________________________________
>David Bergdahl            Ohio University /Athens       tel: (740) 593-2783
>home page: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~bergdahl    fax: (740) 593-2818
>