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Re: spoken & written usage: a response to two threads
Subject:Re: spoken & written usage: a response to two threads From:John Lee Bumgarner <jbumgarner -at- VNET -dot- IBM -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 15 Nov 1994 10:10:44 EST
In re Rose Wilcox 14 Nov 94:
<I was drilled. . . . My parents were working class people working
up to middle class, and my mother particularly wanted us to speak
properly so that we would fit in.> My parents were right off the
farm, just barely above poor white trash, and in moving upward
to middle class, my mother, like yours, saw *proper* language
as way to fit in and as way to move up: proper language was a
signal of respectability. Hence, every time I said *ain't*,
my mother corrected me.
In re Robert Morrisette and Margaret Penman 15 Nov 94:
Growing up in the South, I heard *I go* instead of *I said*
a lot in the Black dialect in junior and senior high school in the
late 1960s and early 1970s; and I had never heard it in my
segregated elementary schools until then. I think it may be
some sort of cultural borrowing like the exchange of musical
heritages in the South, i.e., old-time music. I can't speak
or hypothesize for how it evolved in the U.S. or how it
appears in Australia.
