Word: martinisms
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...message got lost because the school board wrapped it up in so much Afrocentric jargon and education-speak that people thought the board was trying to dumb down the curriculum by teaching bad grammar and syntax. There was enough mangled phraseology in its resolution to make 16 episodes of Martin. But wait, let me get the Kingfish in on this. He's an expert on malapropisms...
...right, but don't paint all Afrocentrics with the same brush," Buckwheat cautioned. "Some of them make the sensible point that black speech patterns are, to a degree, influenced by our African roots. That never stopped orators like Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr. and even some of the young rappers from speaking English far better than most white folks do. And don't forget that American English has been enriched by words with African origins, like gumbo, banjo, zombie and jazz...
...Internet has become such an inescapable part of modern life that it was only a matter of time until some watchdog of etiquette claimed the turf and started drawing boundaries and making rules. Still, credit Judith Martin, the author of the syndicated Miss Manners advice column, with considerable alertness in spotting a tiny void in the decorum field and then moving in with well-wrapped parcels of wisdom about the Net and other conveniences of late 20th century life, like the answering machine and the fax. Though one might suspect her of being a grumpy traditionalist in these matters...
...will find much that is stylistically familiar in Miss Manners' Basic Training: Communication (Crown; 179 pages; $15)--referring to herself in the third person, often amusing in a column but overly arch at book length, and using the locution Gentle Reader. The text is largely a response to letters Martin has allegedly received. It starts off jauntily enough with what Miss Manners likes about life on the Internet: "Cyberspace is like space on the open seas, free of some constraints that should be observed on land." Watch out, though. Already gentility is rearing its well-coiffed head...
...Martin offers prolonged nattering about the subtleties of the Usenet and recaps some of the rules with which the gentle Netsurfer is familiar: no flaming (insulting) or using all capital letters (shouting). One might as well take a beeper to church (another no-no). Furthermore, the well-bred cyberuser will not drop emotional bombs--"You're fired...