Word: englishes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...outnumbered by islanders of Japanese origin (26.4%); the other major non-Caucasian strain is Filipino (17%), followed by Chinese and Korean. Thus while Hawaiian, a melodious language that the missionaries alphabetized into a mere twelve characters, is still spoken and sung on the island, many natives converse in pidgin English, the world's most colorful lingua franca. A dark-hued hotel waiter, cussed out by an irate Texan who has received the soup in his lap, retorts: "Eh, now, no take out on me, you stupid buggah! Udderwise bimeby I gone broke your head in small tiny pieces...
...better places do not curdle the diner's juices with Tin Pan Aloha plunk-plunk music. Some of the most memorable songs are English or American ballads rendered in Hawaiian to a Hawaiian beat; The Battle Hymn of the Republic sounds terrific that way. Many other chants have their island-English versions, to wit: The Twelve Days of Christmas, in which "my tutu [grannie] give to me one mynah bird in one papaya tree, two coconut, three dried squid, four flower lei, five fat pig, six hula lesson, seven shrimp as wimming, eight ukulele, nine pound...
...1960s" or "in the 1960's"? Is it "a U.S. Representative" or "an U.S. Representative"? Where does the apostrophe go in "the Smiths' (or Smith's) car"?*Fifteen times a day, on the average, telephone callers put these questions to an Emporia State University English instructor with the appropriate name of Faye Vowell...
...students and anyone else who calls with a question about correct usage. Other such lines have sprung up lately at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, Ark., and the Johnson County Community College near Kansas City, Kans. "We get several calls a week from California alone," says Arkansas English Instructor Michael Montgomery. The most common questions concern the correct use of who vs. whom, and which vs. that. The most frequent callers are secretaries struggling with their bosses' dictation. But college faculty members and local magazine editors have also rung up the help fully un-silent Vowell...
...years old, and growing steadily in popularity. The phone service costs Arkansas and Johnson County next to nothing, since instructors and graduate students from writing labs are regularly assigned to phone duty, and the callers pay for their own calls. But at Emporia the service is costing the English department roughly an extra $100 per month, because the university pays for calls made to its toll free number from anywhere in the state of Kansas...