Word: syntax
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...simply as possible, it is not the case that Black English is a separate language from White (not "Standard") English nor that it has different syntax from the latter. Black and White English are variants or genera of one language, differing mainly in pronunciation, not grammar. It is a waste of time and energy to teach black children White English "as though it were a foreign language"; black and white children in fact speak the same language, namely English, and are almost always 100% mutually intelligible...
Black English retained some African words that later entered into Standard English (examples: goober, jazz and banjo). More important, Dillard found that Black English arranged English words according to a syntax resembling that of West African languages. Black English does not require a distinction between present and past tenses, for example, but it does require a differentiation between continuous and momentary action. Thus, Dillard notes, if a black says of a laborer, "He workin' when de boss come in," he means that the man worked only when the boss was present. On the other hand, if he says...
Died. Paul Howard ("Dizzy") Trout, 56, Detroit Tigers pitching ace and scrambled-syntax raconteur; of cancer; in Chicago. A country boy from Sandcut, Ind., a town "what can be in two different places overnight if the wind blows hard enough," Trout became a Detroit hero during World War II. In 1944 he won 27 games and posted the lowest earned run average (2.12) in the major leagues. He pitched for several years more, then adapted his freewheeling delivery to a job as the Tigers' radio announcer...
...civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results." Eliot here is making a false analogy between traffic jams and dynamoes, and complications of diction, tone, syntax, and meaning in poetry. He is saying that obscurity and complexity are as necessary to the modern poet as blank verse was to Milton simply because they have certain ressemblances to the surface qualities of modern life. Yeat's late poetry is a good example of the implausibility...
...poem in the Advocate collection stands out as a bright example of intention happily wedded to execution: Jean Boudin's "Checkers." On one level it is a word-game played in nonsense verse with a vivaciously comic sense for awkward syntax and incongruous internal rhyme. Boudin writes for the ear at least as well as she writes for the eye. And her sense of nonsense saves the radical political themes of the poem from didacticism. An attempt at high seriousness would blunt the sting of the poem's political barbs, but irreverence sharpens them with a fitting context. A poet...