[Ads-l] Dialect-related piece in Slate

[Wilson Gray]

When I went to Los Angeles from St. Louisfor the first time, in 1957, I
needed a place for a visiting friend to stay. So, I called around till I
found a cheap motel with an available room. So, we go there. And the guy
tells us that there are no rooms available. I tell the guy that I had
called and been told that there *was* a room available. The guy says,
"Nobody here told you that there was a room available." Even though the guy
was the same guy that I had spoken to on the telephone.

Clearly, using my white voice had been a mistake, since, once guy saw me,
the game was over. But, at that time, I didn't know that the United States
was the same everywhere, whether it be Texas, Missouri, or California. The
only difference was that, in  Texas, a sign would have read, "NO COLORED /
WHITE ONLY," in Missouri, the sign would have read, "We Reserve the Right
to Refuse Service to Anyone." In California, there were no signs. You had
to learn the neighborhoods.

On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 4:17 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
wrote:

> (More specifically on linguistic prejudice and codeswitching)
>
>
> https://slate.com/human-interest/2018/07/linguistic-prejudice-in-sorry-to-bother-you-is-a-real-world-problem.html
>
> The author of the piece, Katie Martin, is a recent Yale linguistics BA
> (’18) who’s been a member of our Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, where
> she's currently a summer intern.
>
> LH
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org