Word: dialects
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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...
...Standard Speech and the Teaching of English. This analysis has been fueled by the renaissance of black cultural pride that began to take place in the mid-1960's. The proponents of this school--Imamu Baraka, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks--maintain that Black English is a well-structured dialect that is a derivation but not a corruption of Standard English. J.L. Dillard's Black English is the first attempt to take a systematic linguistic historical look at the subject and as such offers several important insights...
DILLARD IS CAREFUL to point out that black along, which is often mistaken for Black English, bears no real relationship to the dialect's grammatical structure. Words such as 'chick' for woman, 'squares' for cigarettes, 'hog' for Cadillac, and 'bread' for money are simply colorful additions to Black English and have little to do with the substance of the dialect. In fact, mistaking black slang as Black English leads to the conclusion that the dialect is merely a corruption of English. For example, 'bread' for money is actually a Cockney idiom...
...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...