Grammar Girl's "needs done" survey

[Ben Zimmer]

On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 1:16 PM, Wilson Gray wrote:
>
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Ben Zimmer wrote:
> > with folksy dropped g
>
> You mean "with the standard dropped g of Black English, Southern
> English, Southwestern English, Western English, etc.," of course.
>
> When you make a point of describing Obama's speech as "folksy," here,
> you make it appear that you think that his use of "dropped g" is
> unnatural or artificial, that he's merely faking it in order to appear
> down with the common people or some such thing.
>
> OTOH, if you had written "with gutless dropped g," implying an effort
> on Obama's part not to appear to be too erudite, hence too uppity or
> too biggity, lest he annoy any Republicans who may have condescended
> to concern themselves with what he had to say, well, naturally, I'd
> gladly cosign that.

Didn't mean to imply that Obama's g-dropping was "unnatural" (I don't really
know how "natural" it is for his idiolect), but it's certainly a feature that
Obama, like many other politicians, varies for rhetorical effect (or for
Goffmanian self-presentation, if you prefer). In the context of his Labor Day
speech, it appears to be used as a way of forming solidarity with his audience
and to "folksify" the subject matter, much as Mark Liberman described in his
Language Log post, "Empathetic -in'":

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=732

--bgz

--
Ben Zimmer
http://benzimmer.com/

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