Word: dialectic
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...problem is compounded when racial sensitivities are involved. Should teachers try to enforce the prescriptive rule of standard American English on black children who have learned a dialect at home that is quite different, that is "incorrect" by the standard rules? Ghetto students are often faced with the choice of accepting the teacher's standards or retaining those of family and friends. Says William Smith, associate professor at Boston University's School of Education: "If a child is told the way he speaks is ignorant, he has only two options: ridicule or silence...
...born, in any event, right into comedy. Brooks was one of the four sons of Harry Einstein, a radio dialect comedian who performed under the name Parkyakarkus. At 15, Albert had got up his own act (a short-lived double with Joey Bishop's son Larry). At about the same time, he landed a job at KMPC in Los Angeles as a sportswriter; he made up most of the baseball scores. After studying acting for two years at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech, he took the family name of Brooks and became a TV comedy writer on a show...
...before the meeting of this preposterous pair that Pride of the Bimbos excels. Sayles has a deadly accurate ear for Southern cracker dialect ("Chick at awl?" asks a South Carolina gas-station attendant); the jabbering at a sand-lot baseball game ("Chuckerinthereissgahcantit"); and the good-ole-boy humor ("if that woman fell down a well, you could pump ugly for a week"). Best of all, the gruff friendship between Burns and the young son of a teammate is successfully played for both laughs and pathos; as it does in all initiation tales, the moment comes when the boy must measure...
Silver Showers. To prove this point, Matthiessen writes the novel (his fifth) as if he were on board the Eden and living on short rations. Every fictional resource is jettisoned except snippets of descriptive prose and huge chunks of West Indian pidgin dialect ("Dis de oniest place I ever see bonita on de inside of de reef"). He does not even allow himself access to his characters' thoughts. As far as this novel is concerned, they are what they...
Charlotte Chen, who is president of the Harvard-Radcliffe Chinese Students Association, teaches Mandarin in the Saturday program. Her students are mostly second-generation Chinese who already know English. They want to learn the official Chinese dialect because of their interest in keeping their culture and heritage alive in this country. But Chen--who has always attended English-language schools, though she grew up in Taiwan--acts as more than a teacher. "It's a mutual thing," she says. "I never think of helping anyone. It's more than that. I work with high school girls, and we share...