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

[Robin Hamilton]

Um, a slight (slight? ha!) chronological mis-step -- all the references in
my previous post should have read to *the (late) eighteenth [sic] century*,
not the nineteenth century.

"De Nite Afore Larry Was Stretched" can be pretty closely dated to the 1780s
in Dublin.  Given that it's one of the relatively few major street cant
texts which *can be so precisely located, how I managed to shove it a
hundred years into the future beats me.

Apologies everyone.

Robin Hamilton

> 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

                                [OUCH!!!!!!]

> in what was then called "Newgate Style".

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