Re: Yahoo has no staff tech writers

[Kevin McLauchlan <kmclauchlan -at- chrysalis-its -dot- com>]

On Friday 11 October 2002 12:47,  David Cooper wrote:
> .Kevin wrote:
> ."And when it's all swept away, only the cockroaches will
> remain.... speaking and writing Ebonics."
>
> Interesting metaphor -- that in a "swept up" world, only
> vermin will speak and write in the vernacular of a
> particular ethnic group. Not sure I understand what you
> mean by that.

Well, given that my wife of 21 years is what you folks 
would call "black", I think it's a safe bet that I'm not 
committing the unspeakable crime that you are so 
carefully not quite accusing me of...  :-)

It's just that "Ebonics" stands out so prominently 
as a farcical example of the sociological cooing 
and fawning that attempted to make something 
official out of a transient vernacular. Ebonics is not 
the vernacular of the downtrodden colored masses 
of the USofA. It is some pretentious committee's 
notion of artificially formalizing a snapshot of a 
cultural phenomenon.  I would assert that real 
black folk left that snapshot behind before the 
earnest sociologists and white-bread linguists had 
even finished writing it up.  Well, I *would* assert 
that, except that they didn't even make an accurate 
snapshot.  Ebonics quickly became a metaphor 
for a certain kind of farce and pretention.  It'll live 
forever, now, preserved by bureaucrats and scholars...
none of whom are the people they thought would speak 
and write it.

Never mind.

/kevin

PS:  My smiley (above), was inaccurate. 
       I just don't remember the one for "sneer". 


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