Word: roading
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Many of the black kids at Ann Arbor's Green Road Housing Project in Michigan do not talk much like their well-to-do white classmates at the neighborhood King elementary school. Some of it is simple pronunciation: "We do maf work" for "We do mathematics work." Some of the differences lie in odd verb tenses: "She-ah hit us" for "She will hit us." More often the difference involves the verb "to be." Green Readers say, "He be gone" when they mean, "He is gone a good deal of the time"; "He been gone" when they mean...
Such speech, widely known as black English, is customarily pounced upon by teachers trying to teach standard English usage. Though that would seem a normal part of pedagogy, a small group of Green Road parents felt that teachers were expressing their disapproval of black English too harshly, causing student embarrassment and hurting the children's chances to learn. The parents filed a federal suit in Michigan's Eastern District Court, demanding that school authorities "recognize" black English as a formal dialect with historic roots and grammatical rules...
...system today no more resembles free enterprise than a freeway resembles a dirt road." So said Environmentalist Barry Commoner, 62, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, last week as he launched a drive to form the Citizens Party. The new political party will promote alternative energy programs, environmental issues and greater government control of big corporations. Said Commoner: "Elevating the national interest above vested private interests is the heart of what the Citizens Party is all about...
...Zambia is to avoid widespread famine, it will need 300,000 tons of corn by the end of the year. Kenya has offered 100,000 tons, but this would have to be transported-inefficiently, and perhaps tardily-by road from Kenya and then along the Tazara Railway. Thus Zambia is relying on South Africa for corn and on Zimbabwe-Rhodesia to deliver the food shipments by rail...
...Natural Resources Committee, juggling metaphors in a bureau critique of the Administration's synthetic-fuel program: "We have to make a beginning. But we don't have to present the big picture or go off the deep end. The sensible thing is to start down the road with every possible safeguard, recognizing that there are problems...