Yale Alumni Magazine has regaled its readers with an article about the university’s “grammar non-discrimination team” that advocates the acceptance of expressions like “I loves my grammar” and “he ain’t lerned nothing” as equal to the “dialect of the elite.” The dialect of the elite is, to give an example, the language I’m using on this blog.
The so-called linguist who leads the team of spoiled rich Yale brats in this “let’s condescend to the stupid proles” endeavor regales us with the ridiculous idea that the grammar of the English language is ver complex. One would think that even a Linguistics 101 student, let alone a professor, would know that English has one of the simplest gramars of all Indo-European languages. Well, what can you expect from an idiot who justifies the existence of the “grammar non-discrimination team” by saying that “we don’t wear our hair the same way as our grandparents did.” Don’t ask me how the hair-style choices of this Legally Blonde joke of a professor should be relevant to what projects the university undertakes.
As an elitist who thinks that if you speak a language, it isn’t that much trouble to learn to speak it correctly, I’m appalled at what my alma mater is becoming. Yale’s graduate school is rapidly turning into a finishing school for the children of the very rich who entertain themselves with non-discrimination teams as they wait for their trust funds to mature.
Clarissa's Blog 
All stereotypes aside, I’ve seen very little evidence that lower class people, on the whole, actually use simpler language than upper class people. Especially in North America.
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What really bugs me is that these very same losers from the non-discrimination team look down on people like me because of the very slight accent I have. This doesn’t prevent them from blabbing about avoiding discrimination.
Just like my colleague, the Marxist factory owner.
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This is a very blatant attempt to deepen the class divide. Obviously the rich Daddies of these students will never consider hiring the people who speak these “dialects” for any but the most menial, low-paying jobs. So who gains from the plan not to teach certain groups of people to speak correctly? Who gains from keeping them locked permanently in ghetttoes?
This is in no way different from the pseudo-feminist efforts to glorify toilet-cleaning as a female task par excellence.
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Off-topic but I had to do a double-take at your “deepen the class divide” comment because of your capitalization of “Daddies”. Took me a moment to figure out you weren’t talking about sugar babies/Daddies….probably.
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I find myself:
a) agreeing with you about this being an attempt to deepen the class divide, since whatever one may think about the value of various dialects, an attempt to deny people who don’t speak the most socially valued dialect chances to learn to speak it will most likely deny social status and opportunities to the non-speakers rather than have their dialects be equally valued.
b) disagreeing with you about such and such being incorrect versions of English rather than correct versions of non-standard English dialects. Unlike, for example, French or my native Romanian, English has no central authority dictating the proper use of the language and therefore has much more variation in usage than French or Romanian – which is one of the reasons I dearly love this language. These variations often allow the expression of things hard to express concisely in standard English – while the examples you’ve given could be expressed as easily in standard English, many others – such as AAVE verb tenses or the Ozark English “all y’all” or “might could” cannot. I don’t recognize the first example you’ve given as part of any dialect I’ve heard of (it sounds more like stereotypical “savage talk” although I could be wrong) and while the “ain’t” construction is standard Southern American English, the misspelling of “learned” as an attempt to represent the phonetic transcription of a word belonging to a language that doesn’t do phonetic ortography makes me think this is less a case of someone actually advocating for acceptance of diversity as the case of some fancy-ass snob wishing the wrong sort of people would stop talking proper English. Ultimately, I find myself most in agreement with what I think (I seem to remember reading it on her blog, but it’s been a long time ago, and LJ blogs aren’t exactly easy to search) is Suzette Haden Elgin’s take on this – the best way to teach standard English to people who speak another dialect natively is by explaining the differences between standard English and the English dialect spoken by the students rather than pretending the dialect the students speak is standard English with a bunch of mistakes in it.
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There can be a discussion on how best to teach language skills and it’s an important discussion to have. However, the direction in which these non-discrimination efforts always go is to suggest that certain schools (and we can all guess which schools these will be) don’t need standard English to be taught in them at all. Why “waste” the taxpayers’ money when there is a perfectly legitimate dialect these kids possess already? And when I hear this argument, I get very disturbed. Some children will be doomed to unemployment from the start as a result of such measures that hide behind progressive and nice-sounding labels.
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Yes, you get the same my side/their side posturing you often get in such policy debates. One side says we should teach standard English because it is the only proper one and the other says that because non-standard dialects exist as such, there’s no reason to teach standard English to people who don’t have it as their native dialect. One side is factually wrong and the other’s logically wrong so they can rattle sabers at each other forever while achieving nothing but stronger identification with their group. For added entertainment, the majority of the people involved in this debate speak standard English natively and know little to nothing about any non-standard dialects. People who actually speak non-standard dialects don’t get to be part of this discussion, though the logically wrong side does tend to quote some of them on the value of AAVE (but not Ozark English, because supporting those hillbillies won’t allow the supporter to score anti-racist points) and hope nobody notices the aforequoted never said “and thus, we shouldn’t teach standard English”. It’s the worst kind of circus.
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It’s my alma mater (undergraduate school) as well and I second the motion.
Dan
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From the ever-so fascinating mindset which brought you the “Simplified Spelling Society”…
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Agree with you totally. This is absurd.
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// Some children will be doomed to unemployment from the start …
Can’t something similar be happening with Europian immigrants? Let them keep their culture, hijabs, etc and continue having high reproduction rate to fill in the worst jobs in society. Marxist explanation of “tolerance” as a nice sounding economic exploitation method, even if most believers in it don’t understand it themselves.
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How about “immigrants” recently arrived from Twitter? Will their “tweets” fit n 2 ho 2 spek rele gud? Y no what I mene?
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Yes, I already see the students’ writing being infected with this issue. Many have no idea how to transmit their ideas without the use of smiley or sad faces.
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🙂
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EXACTLY. This is one of the many ways progressive verbiage is used for very unprogressive purposes.
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It’s the postmodernist’s move: You are what you are and that is unchangeable. It is also wrong to be what you are, so you must sidestep it and try to act like something else. That is ethics.
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Standard English is a work of art created by our entire society over many centuries. It is rude, much like spraypainting something on the Mona Lisa or carving your initials on Michangelo’s David, to use improper grammar, etc. If you are creating your own derivative piece, as in a dialect, that is of course OK. There is a difference. Confusing the two is problematic.
This is the best metaphoric explanation I have as to why use of non-standard English in formal situations is problematic.
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David, this is beautiful!!! Would you mind if I put this on my door?
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Not at all. i am flattered!
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@David
Interesting metaphor. In that context I can see why some people would prefer the use of a dialect or slang. They don’t much enjoy artwork like the Mona Lisa.
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Many people use regional dialect in some conversations and standard English in other conversations and in writing. I don’t mind regional dialect spoken in a casual context. I insist on correct usage in written work and in the classroom. It is easy enough to be influenced by regional dialect and commit grammatical errors in formal communications. I am too old to tk txting stl srly.
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Heh, it seems txtspell has its conventions as well. I don’t txtspell, but I can recognize that txtspell bit as wrong and unnatural 😛
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Is this the article, Clarissa? http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/articles/3716 . The person interviewed says students should learn both the standard dialect and the local one, and I can’t say I see any problems there.
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“The person interviewed says students should learn both the standard dialect and the local one, and I can’t say I see any problems there.”
– Students today come out of high schools without the capacity to create a simple sentence in the only language they kind of speak, no knowledge of how to use the apostrophe, no understanding of how personal pronouns work, no understanding of the difference between adjectives and adverbs. Even the graduates of super expensive private schools that end up at Yale come there with zero foreign language skills. And they don’t know how to use the apostrophe either.
Realistically, if it is proving so impossible to get them to speak a single language correctly, what possible sense can it make to allocate non-existent resources to teach both “they didn’t nobody live up there” (an example from the article) and the correct version?
I do a lot of remedial teaching as it is. And OK, I’m fine doing that. But if I have to battle every student who will tell me “But my high school teacher said it’s OK to say “nothing they didn’t do””, that’s the limit. People want to play politically correct games, calling grammar mistakes “a dialect”, that’s fine. But I reserve the right to say that all of this is nothing but ignorance.
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Ah, right. I did a bit of reading and it seems that people only have to study grammar for 1 college course before being allowed to teach English in schools, and the teaching of grammar in schools is discouraged because of some woolly-headed notion that it interferes with the development of writing skills, of all things. I can imagine how you’d end up with college students with no idea how to use the apostrophe if nobody bothers to explain to school students the difference between plural and genitive.
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I was petrified when I realized students had no idea what a noun or an adjective were. Imagine teaching foreign languages to people who are unfamiliar with this very basic terminology.
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