[Ads-l] Heard: dialogue

[Wilson Gray]

I remember when they started teaching us prescriptive syntax, in the fourth
grade, when school turned into school, with homework and shit. A lot of
children who had formerly said,


_Me and John went to the show and him and Bill saw me and John at it_

began to say,

_John and I went to the show and Bill and he saw John and I there_

The idea was supposed to be that 1) the Objective case can not be used in
place of the Nominative and that 2) using _1st First Person and Non-1st
Person_ is less polite than using _Non-1st Person and 1st Person_. The
former rule is patently obvious to anyone with the merest kiss of a
classical education and the latter requires no explanation to anyone with a
modicum of "Klass with a capital K."

Of course, such niceties were meaningless to a student body 99.44% made up
of impoverished Negro chirren who, ca. 1946, had never before heard such a
manner of speaking in their real lives, who would never hear it again, and
who would attempt to use it only on English-test essay questions or when
they felt some other compulsion to use "proper English." as opposed to
using ordinary Merican*.

*cf., e.g.
Studies in linguistics. Occasional papers. Volume 13. 1975.
Joan G. Fickett
'Merican: an inner-city dialect

FWIW, _Merican_, as I prefer to spell it, was the ordinary name used by
everyday colored people for the English language  practically everywhere
that I've ever lived. It wasn't until I got into high school, where I was
one of only seven black students among ca. 800, that I began fully to
understand why white people referred to Merican as "English," despite the
fact that English is the language of England and American is the language
of America, and why a nun had corrected me when I wrote an essay in grade
school concerning the "_American_ Catholic Church" and not the "_Roman_
Catholic Church in the United States" aut sim. E.g., there were two
textbooks - English Literature, containing only writings in English by
white Englishpeople - and American Literature, containing only writings in
English and in Negro dialect - e.g. The Green Pastures, featuring "de Lawd"
- by white Americans

It's too bad that Labov's "Black (Vernacular) English" had long since swept
the field, before Fickett's paper appeared. Otherwise, BVE/AAVE😜 might be
called by the term native to the community and not by one imposed from
outside by the Man or from above by some random boojie.

On Mon, Apr 30, 2018 at 7:38 AM, Arnold M. Zwicky <zwicky at stanford.edu>
wrote:

>
>
> > On Apr 29, 2018, at 10:20 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > X. Blah, blah, blah...
> >
> > A. Shut up! This is between *grandpa* and me!
> >
> > B. "Between grandpa and _I_!" If you're going to talk, at least use
> proper
> > grammar!
> >
> >
> > As far as I could tell, this "correction" was meant to be understood as
> > serious.
> >
> > Sigh!
>
>
> 5/4/12 Idiolect or style level?
>
> https://arnoldzwicky.org/2012/05/04/idiolect-or-style-level/
>
> I do ... know where my judgment that many speakers see the nominative of
> ordinary personal pronouns as formal, serious, or emphatic comes from: some
> speakers have said as much to me, and here’s a quote from a Prairie Home
> Companion comedy skit (from September 2004) that presupposes this belief
> about NomConjObjs (nominative conjoined objects):
>
>   These are the good days for Jim and me — or Jim and I, as I used to say
> when I went to college.
>
> arnold
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> 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