McWhorter on "Negro" [Was: on "Negro English"]

[Robin Hamilton]

> "Broadly parodied"? "Ineptly set down"? "Burlesqued"? "Distorted"? "Made
> an
> object of ridicule"? "Recast as minstrel-show/ music-hall patter"? "Turned
> to low-comedic purpose"? "Force-fit into literary/ subliterary
> convention"?
> "Simplified"?  "Stylized" ? "Stereotyped"?
>
> Can't think of an existing technical term: even "put into blackface" is
> new
> to me, though instantly comprehensible.  (Applied to "Larry," however,
> it's
> misleading and even tendentious.)
>
> JL

Thanks for the suggestions, Jon, and I'd entirely agree with your point
about the term as applied to Larry.

I should stress it was my first reaction, when I came on the original
version in _Dublin Sixty Years Ago_, having been used to the "usual" version
given by Robert Graves in _English Ballads_ (correct title?).  It was even
my second and third reaction, that "The Night Before Larry Was Stretched"
had been *rewritten in blackface, since virtually all web references are to
the Anglicised text, making Larry appear all too similar to a late
nineteenth century London cant-speaking criminal.

I eventually found it -- and as far as I know, it's *still the only place
other than the original sources where the "correct" text is given -- in
Andrew Carpenter, _Verse in English from Eighteenth-Century Ireland_ (Cork,
Ireland: Cork University Press, 1998), pages 430-445.  Carpenter gives his
sources, and prints three other poems from Dublin in the late nineteenth
century in what was then called "Newgate Style".

At that point, having yet once more sighed and thought that while Stephen
Farmer's _Musa Pedestris_ was the best thing since sliced bread, and years
ahead of its time when it was first published in 1896, it's also the source
of more than a few misconceptions about cant texts, I began to do some
serious digging around the issue.

(I won't bore the list with the results, but if anyone would like fuller
references to this, and a collection of all the texts I finally managed to
put together, I'd be happy to supply them backchannel.)

The only reason I'm reluctant to take credit for coining the term "dressed
in blackface" is that I find it difficult to believe no one used it before
me.  But then maybe I'm the only person who's fascinated by the semiotics of
the different verbal dress codes used on internet lists.  To the extent that
I once began trying to put together an article entitled "Internet Discussion
Lists Considered in Terms of Primate Territoriality," where the idea as well
as the title was partly derived, 'pataphysics yet once more, from Alfred
Jarry's "The Crucifiction Considered As A Downhill Bicycle Race."

Robin Hamilton

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