Fwd: conversating

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

Well, if we can have pairs like "ameliorate--amelioration" and "(to) elaborate---elaboration," I suppose it's not suprising that "conversate" may arise as a back-formation to "conversation."

Btw, is there any added prestige to saying "conversate" rather than simply "converse"? I.e., if someone says "conversate" might this (at least in the mind of the speaker) sound more educated?  Is it perhaps a racial thing, preferred more by African-Americans than whites?

Gerald Cohen


________________________________

From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Beverly Flanigan
Sent: Sat 10/21/2006 12:25 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Fwd: conversating

We've talked about this -ating inflection before, but here's another example from a friend in Kentucky:

        From: "Elizabeth Winkler" <vulturechick at accessky.net>
        To: flanigan at ohio.edu
        Subject: conversating
        Date: Fri, 20 Oct 2006 07:47:09 -0500
	
        I got it again this morning in the discussion board section of my on-line class in SLA. Here's the question I asked and the response:
	
        "Should classroom grades reflect both the ability to carry on a reasonable conversation as well as test accuracy through written and oral tests?  What should the balance be?"
	
        Answer:  "These are questions I am thinking about now.  Conversational skills as well as written skills are not equally important.  Some students may want to learn specifically for conversating, others specifically for reading, and still others for both.  Would it be important to find out what each student is specifically interested in?"
	
        The speaker is a working class woman, African American enrolled in a 400 level SLA class.
	

        My friend later added that she's only heard it so far from African Americans.  As a sidenote, I also get pseudo-formal connectors like the "as well as" substituted for "and" above.  "Although" in place of "However" at the beginning of a presumably simple independent clause is also increasingly common, even with a comma:  "Although, it wasn't true."
	
        Beverly Flanigan
        Ohio University

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