Language Myths
I got this a little while back, and while it was enjoyable enough, I found it a bit repetitive. If you know anything about linguistics (even as little as I know), there’s not a lot here that will be new to you…I’d guess that you’d be able to outline the main argument of each essay if not all the details just from the title. Possibly the most surprising thing to me was encountering a myth that I’d never even heard before, that “In Appalachia They Speak Like Shakespeare.”
Possibly the most eye-rolling bit is treating all black people regardless of time or geography as belonging to the same culture in “Black Children are Verbally Deprived” (so the oratorical traditions that gave rise to Kwame Nkrumah, Odumegwu Ojukwu, or Desmond Tutu, or even Frederick Douglass are somehow supposed to count as part of the culture of African-American inner-city children); it would have been better to stick to Jesse Jackson, Barbara Jordan, and Martin Luther King as examples of the richness of at least semi-current African-American oration. But, beyond the question of whether the examples are actually relevant, the structure of the argument is off. Nobody would accept that inner-city African-American children aren’t economically deprived just because they’ve come from a culture that’s given rise to the multi-millionaires Michael Jackson, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, and so forth. The rest of the essay goes on to do a much better job, but it’s a really weak opening.
I’d say my favorite essay was “English Spelling Is Kattastroffik.” I think it’s the juiciest, with the most concrete examples, and so probably the only one I would have referred back to later.
I passed this book along yesterday via Bookmooch, so even though I wasn’t blown away by it, I hope its new owner finds it informative and useful.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
sounds like an interesting book.