Word: dialectical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...long been subjected to racist analyses. Unable to understand a language that sounds superficially like a shirring of their own, white scholars have concocted a variety of theories to explain the speech patterns of Afro-Americans H. L. Mencken wrote in his influential The American Language. "The Negro dialect as we know it today seems to have been formulated by the songwriters for the minstrel shows." Mencken, in his typically culturally-biased manner, simply assumed that blacks were incapable of constructing their own language, and were only able to mimic what they heard in traveling sideshows. But Mencken's theory...
...Chicago. After several years on the Southern tent-show circuit, Correll and another white vaudevillian, Freeman Gosden, teamed up on radio in 1928 to create the roles of Amos (a kindly taxi driver played by Gosden) and Andy (a scheming misadventurer portrayed by Correll). With its fractured black-dialect humor, the show became radio's first major craze. At the height of the program's popularity in the '30s, hotels canceled room service and movie theaters stopped their features during air time. By and large, blacks detested Amos 'n' Andy's portrayal of Negroes...
Those skeptical of Casey's craft might argue that his reliance of dialect is a mere trick, that anyone with his eyes and ears open for a few years in Vietnam could capture and same idiosyncrasies and recount the same stories, that one work is not enough to establish Casey as a poet to be reckoned with. I would disagree. If his obsession with speech patterns smacked of phoniness, the impact of his work would fade quickly. But his achievement seems more impressive upon each rereading of his book. In fact, the skill in constructing poems to intense despite their...
...most citizens that complaint seems illiterate. To a linguist it is a good example of Black English, a dialect with its own grammar and vocabulary. For three centuries, it has been the language of most American Negroes, but until recently, both its origins and its rules have remained a mystery. Scholars once thought that it was either an ignorant misuse of Standard English or a remnant of archaic British dialects learned by slaves from their Southern masters. Lately, however, a number of linguists have come to believe that the dialect originated with the slaves themselves...
...didn't see the front page except for a slugline "Dems Quarters Break-In" in the table of contents. Wire copy dominated news space, and there was little investigative material outside of trying to track down, no less, the Route 2 sniper. And the editors still love the Record dialect in headlines: "U.S. Confuses Red Radar, Cripples Red Air Defense." Not to mention the non-sequiturs like "List 29 Americans Dead in British Jet Crash" or "Hub Tolls Grief for 9 Firemen...