shellacking

Victor Steinbok aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM
Fri Nov 5 18:06:06 UTC 2010


Although I expressed the same sentiment, FWIW, I don't think Charlie
Doyle's reference to dialects had anything to do with Obama. I don't
want to speak for him--he's perfectly capabable of doing it himself--but
I don't share Ron's particular concern (at least, not in this instance).

I also just realized that I am not really in the category "younger than
Obama" (it's just a couple of years, really--there should be a "much"
there somewhere) and that my
/English/-formative years were spent in Chicago and Boston. So it should
be no surprise that /I/ find his usage unsurprising.

     VS-)

On 11/5/2010 8:02 AM, Ronald Butters wrote:
> ...
> There is nothing whatever unusual or regional about it, except (apparently) it is slightly archaic to some folk who are younger than Obama.
>
> Why would anyone suggest that, just because Obama used it, it could be "Southern" or "AAVE"? Obama never lived in the South, did he? Nor did he have much opportunity to learn AAVE as a youth. Are we really to assume that any American who has the genes that Obama inherited from his father is automatically a speaker of AAVE (and therefore Southern States English)?
> ...

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