Depends on the situation. I sometimes catch one of these “Judge shows” on TV, and it amazes me to hear someone speaking before a judge using language like “we was”, “I was like”, “then he goes”, etc. Those people are stupid, and it’s not snobby to say so. Someone who is unwilling – or unable – to affect a more refined presentation when in court isn’t the sharpest crayon in the box.
It doesn’t mean that the person is stupid - it just means that for some reason they aren’t using English correctly.
Spin it any way you like. Whether you’re speaking or writing, there is generally a right way to use the English language, and many wrong ways.
Sometimes people will proudly rationalize the incorrect use of English to make themselves feel better - and often if there is a need to establish an identity apart from a larger group. There’s an entire subject relating to the need for groups to create and identify with unique variations of language, customs, and beliefs that are “their own”.
*Just don’t expect others to buy into your belief system, OK? * If your unique variation of English makes you feel good, buck up and deal with the flak you’ll sometimes get, because it’s part of the deal.
So a person who grows up thoroughly immersed in their regional (or class) dialect and who has not been taught to use some different vernacular is stupid? I would tend to say that people who make broad brush categorizations on such topics are ignorant–and wait for further exchanges to discover whether their ignorance is simple or willful.
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No, the spinning in this case, is being done by the person who is clearly ignorant of all the variations of correct English that are defined by region and class. There are definitely ways that are more associated with “educated” English, (and those multiple ways differ among Oxonians, Boston brahmins, and the Chicago school of broadcasting, although to a lesser extent than between the dialects of Cornwall and the LA barrios), but as long as one is not violating the rules for the dialect one is speaking, one is not speaking an “incorrect” form of English.
A bit of both but mostly the latter. Slamming someone for speaking in dialect when you’re typing in pidgin shorthand yourself is ludicrous in its irony.
Unless they somehow missed out on attending primary school, then yes. And I find it hard to imagine that there are too many children in the US that have not had the opportunity of a public education. Now, there may be people who have been properly educated, but have been raised to ignore that education (possibly having been ridiculed for speaking “correctly”). In that case, I can only weep for a society that passes its ignorance from one generation to the next.
Then your methodology is similar to my own. In the situation that I mentioned above, I would assume that the speaker were either ignorant, or an idiot (big difference). Further exchanges would make the proper determination apparent. Note that while I agree that improper language usage can be a result of simple ignorance, it is more often (especially in a society that makes primary education mandatory) indicative of willful stupidity.
You need to have visited a lot more primary schools. (And I mean over the last century, not in some recent period that we can all claim are not doing their jobs.) Despite what some might have one believe, schools tend to teach in the vernacular–and they always have. There will have been schools in some locales where speech was taught to some imagined Received English standard, but the majority of schools have simply presented rules of grammar (filtered by local dialect) to be echoed on tests and forgotten, just as they have taught algebra or history or any of the other subjects for which students have not seen an immediate use. Actual Received English speech has only been taught on rare occasions.
Sound like simple class discrimination to me. I suspect that you have been imposing your own class prejudices on other speakers unconsciously for a long time.
(Now, in the case of most of the “public court” TV shows, we are probably not dealing with the brightest of the land, but that has little to do with their speech patterns as opposed to their willingness to risk public humiliation to bicker over small claims on TV.)
I agree with Stonebow that Cosby’s point in the cite from post 4 is essentially: Teach your kids “standard English” and when to use it, regardless of how they speak among their friends, because they’re not going to get very far if they don’t know it.
Those of you who have been on the related threads know my position on “correct” usage. There is no inherently “correct” dialect, and people who speak differently from me aren’t therefore stupid, ignorant, or wrong. But it’s just a fact of life that ignorance of the “standard” dialect has real consequences in this world.
That said, some people use dialect intentionally to set themselves apart, to identify themselves against the mainstream or the upper class, or to prevent outsiders from understanding what they mean.
I agree largely with the OP and with tomndeb. In my time I have known and worked with plenty of intelligent, funny, insightful, creative, and adaptable people who speak 24/7 in dialects that allow constructions like “ain’t no”, “used to could”, “might oughta”, and “it don’t”. In fact, I’m related so some of them.
It cuts both ways, though. I know people who’ve alienated me because I talk too much like a city boy, and they know I’m just a mill kid.
So be it. Cosby’s right and Biggirl is right. Knowing the accepted mainstream dialect is useful and parents ought to see that their kids understand this. Judging others’ intelligence or worth based on dialectical variations like “aint” and “you was” is mere snobbery.
Are textbooks not standardized? Do they not teach things like subject-verb agreement and proper conjugation? Then, even if the teacher uses horrible English, the onus is still upon the students to learn the material they are presented with. It’d be different if the textbooks has phrases like, “we was going to the store,” but they don’t.
If a student is taught English and then promptly forgets it, I place them at the same level as someone who was taught basic geography, yet cannot point to France on a map. A student who is unwilling to learn something as basic as the grammar of their own language is demonstrating willful ignorance, and I have very little regard for such a mindset.
It’s not like I’m asking people to memorize the periodic table, or to be able to diagram every sentence in the collected works of Shakespeare, for Jeebus’ sake. But everyone should know the basic rules of the language that they speak. It’s not like too many people have no access at all to radio or TV, so almost everyone’s at least heard standard English usage a time or two. Further, it’s not like anything they they’ve ever read is written the way they speak (other than perhaps notes written by friends/classmates). In other words, there are very few people who have had no exposure at all to proper English grammar.
This is a good point. I’m not going to say that people who routinely say “We was going to the store” are stupid, because I know that’s frequently not the case. I also understand that we all speak a different way when we’re in our own “group.” However, you’ve got to wonder what’s going through some people’s heads. They’ve got to notice that the grammar in books and magazines (and what is used on TV and movies) is radically different than what they are using. Have they not connected the dots? A gaffe here and there I understand—hell, I am guilty of it as much as the next person. But people who seem to insist on using really off-the-wall, radically non-standard grammar (“non-standard” compared to what is printed in every newspaper, book, uttered on TV, and so forth), well, either they know what they’re doing and they don’t care, or they are oblivious.
I grew up in an area where bad accents and non-standard English is a way of life. Once I got out in the real world, I quickly realized that my elementary school teachers were right, and that people took me more seriously if I spoke standard English as heard in the workplace or school.
Put it this way: you may sit around in your dirty sweats at home, with your hair uncombed and your favorite ripped-up sweater while you hang out with your buddies and watch TV. There’s nothing wrong with that. But when you get up and go to work, you put on your business casuals, or a suit, or a uniform, or whatever you happen to wear to work. You comb your hair, take a shower, and put on decent shoes. Why do you do that? Because you want to project a professional, intelligent demeanor.
Language is the same. The language you speak at home with your family and buddies is fine. But for God’s sake, learn how to speak it correctly for when you go out into the world. If you don’t, you’re going to get the same level of respect that you’d get if you showed up at work wearing your pajamas with dirty hair and smelling like sweat because you didn’t shower. If you did that periodically, people would start to wonder if you were less intelligent as it doesn’t take a lot of smarts to realize that you dress one way and home and another way at work. In the same vein, you’re going to get funny looks if you don’t drop the slang and at least try to adhere to standard English when you’re out in the world.
Oh bullshit. This is a surprisingly silly and inane semantic twist.
I’ll come up with my own regional dialect that no one else in the country can really understand, and we’ll call that correct English too, since I’m not breaking the rules of my new dialect.
The “dialect” doesn’t define the rules of English. It’s the other way around.
(Bolding mine)
It’s “children who,” not “children that.”
So is your misuse a result of simple ignorance, or, because it’s (supposedly) “more often” the case, shall I assume you are willfully stupid?
Must suck for you, living in Baltimore, if that bugs you.
It all bugs me. People from the city, regardless of colour, speak very differently from how I was raised to speak. When I first moved to Maryland, I will admit that I could not understand people a lot of the time. I’ve gotten used to it, but I never realized how much until my parents were here over Christmas.
I asked a salesperson in JC Penney’s a question, while I was shopping with Mom. I got the answer, and Mom and I went off. Mom then told me that she had not understood even one word of what the salesperson had said.
It’s not a “semantic twist” at all, much less “inane” or “surprising”.
booka, you can’t “come up with [your] own regional dialect that no one else in the country can really understand”. If others don’t understand you, it’s not a dialect.
“Rules of English” are abstracted from usage. A “dialect” is defined by regional variation, not “rules”.
Multiple modals such as “might ought to” are allowed in some dialects (such as my own) but not in others, for example. I use them even at work, where many of the writers and editors on staff also use them. We’ll say to each other “We might ought to change that,” even though they would never use that construction in a book and I’d never use it in an ad (it doesn’t fit our products’ image and might alienate some buyers). It’s quite useful, and is very precise, not “sloppy” or “wrong” or “dumb” as I’ve heard such usage described.
Joe Random, are you “demonstrating willful ignorance” by not making your pronoun agree with its antecedent? No. You are using a common construction. That construction would have cost you points had you used it in an assignment in any of my classes. But that doesn’t make it “wrong” on this board and it doesn’t mean you have a mindset worthy of disdain.
Re the bolded phrases, let’s not confuse the English language itself with standard edited American English.
Btw, I obviously misspoke here. Dialectic variations do not have to be tied to geography. They can be tied to ethnicity, class, etc. There may be a dozen dialects spoken by the residents of a single city block, for example.
Ah, so of which fast food chain are you employed? 
I can’t understand many inner-city black and hispanic people. Is it a dialect or a different language? For that matter, I sometimes have a hard time understanding some British and Austrailian movies, especially the ones that include things like cockney accents or other non-standard English. GingerOfTheNorth says that she had a hard time understanding native Baltimorians. So I guess they speak their own language?
Everybody makes mistakes fool, it is those that don’t learn from them and deliberately wallow in feces that deserve contempt.
Ahem. “Those who,” not “those that.” But you knew that, right?