The Nine Lives of "Linguistic Deficiency"

[Kephart, Ronald]

On 2/8/07 9:44 AM, "Alexandre Enkerli" <enkerli at gmail.com> wrote:

> Might be going too far, here. Yet, since Labov, Eckert, and even Pullum, seems
> to me like things haven't changed that much.
> 
> I'd *love* to be proven wrong!
> 
You'll have a long wait. This is my 18th year of teaching (nearly every
semester!) intro to linguistics to an audience of prospective teachers
(language arts and English lit/comp types). Every group that comes before me
has the same old, tired, linguistically demolished folk notions about
language. Every semester I struggle to demonstrate the grammatical validity
of Ebonics, the phonological ok-ness of my own Appalachian speech, the real
nature of prescriptions such as no "double negatives" or not "ending a
sentence with a preposition." I'm pretty sure I send some few of these folks
out into the world with changed ideas, but I suspect that most of them
finish the course and then file it all in some to-be-deleted folder in their
minds.

The same game of whack-a-mole is played over and over again with the "race
and IQ" folks. And those folks, by the way, are almost never linguists or
anthropologists. I've often wondered: we can sue physicians for malpractice;
what about the psychologists (that's who it usually seems to be) who seem to
be always bringing up language deficiencies, IQ and race, and the like?

As I often sign off on another listserve: "We're all doomed."

Ron