Word on the Street: Debunking the Myth of "Pure" Standard English

by John McWhorter

Though there is a contingent of linguists who fight the fact, our language is always changing -- not only through slang, but sound, syntax, and words' meanings as well. Debunking the myth of "pure" standard English, tackling controversial positions, and eschewing politically correct arguments, linguist John McWhorter considers speech patterns and regional accents to demonstrate just how the changes do occur. Wielding reason and humor, McWhorter ultimately explains why we must embrace these changes, ultimately revealing our American English in all its variety, expressiveness, and power.

Genres: Linguistics, Language, Nonfiction, Writing, Adult

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

John Hamilton McWhorter (Professor McWhorter uses neither his title nor his middle initial as an author) is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

A popular writer, McWhorter has written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Politico, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The New York Daily News, City Journal, The New Yorker, among others; he is also contributing editor at The Atlantic and hosts Slate's Lexicon Valley podcas

Reviews

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the one-sentence description of this book: if a grammar rule forces you to say something awkward or that sounds wrong, then it's a safe bet that what is "wrong" is the grammar rule.

--update
Some of the points he discusses:
-All languages are always changing.
-Just because something in language is "illogical" doesn't mean it's wrong.
-Whom is unnatural because it's the sole remnant of what was hundreds of case endings in Old English. Its death is inevitable.
-They/their is a perfectly acceptable singular pronoun, precisely because everyone uses it that way.
-Not splitting infinitives and not ending sentences with prepositions aren't even real rules of English. They're faux-Latin.
-Shakespeare is boring/tedious because he essentially wrote in a foreign language (late Middle English?). Many many words meant different things then than they do now, and what is almost incomprehensible to us would have been readily accessible to people at the time. We should translate Shakespeare into modern English to renew the joy in the experience.

But what McWhorter *really* wanted to write about was the controversy of classifying Black English ("ebonics") as a foreign language and teaching English as a second language to kids who speak BE. He devotes 3 full chapters to this, much much more than he devotes to any other topic. I didn't care 3 chapters worth.

--update: Goodreads says that this book has an average rating of 5.65 out of 5 stars. So to the list of reasons why this book is good, please add 'supernatural powers that trump/transcend math.'

[Growlingsoulpup · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man is the Captain America to every Grammar Nazi. 'Nuff sed.

[stephanie suh · Rating 5 out of 5]

What does Samuel Johnson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Steven Pinker have in common besides great writers and thinkers? They are trailblazers of mind over language, gadflies of truth, and teachers of knowledge. To the band of perspicacious observers of the human mind, joins John McWhorter as a brilliant linguist and author of cracking Word on the Street, an invigorating narrative told in scholastic zeal and impressive erudition flavored with street-smart audacity. McWhorter talks about language and its connatural neutrality on the continuum of intelligence level that makes the academic subject a hot topic of a Charlie Rose talk show.

McWhorter takes his view against language relativism that language shapes thoughts. The possession of words does not determine the thought process to contextualize the mentalese. Therefore, slang, idioms, and parlance outside the elite group of society and the educated middle class are not denigrated as improper English. In this sense, Pidgeon English, the quaintly charming admixture of scattered English words and a speaker’s native language, is not a corrupt version of pristine English but a hybrid of languages born out of the ingenuity of the human mind and changeability of language in nature. Isn’t English a living proof of the incredible amalgamation of languages still undergoing evolution? Who would have thought that English of the underclass would shine as a lingua franca?

What strikes me most about the book, which concurs to his fellow linguist Pinker’s point of view on language as a touchstone for one’s cognitive ability, is that solecism in spoken and written language does not reflect the user’s less desirable trait of academic ineptitude. To put it more bluntly, just because your grammar is besotted with errors doesn’t mean you don’t know what you are saying, or forthright, you are less intelligent. Take Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance polymath, who had no fewer than six grammar books on Latin and Greek to grasp the syntax of the classical dead languages he was so hopeless to learn thanks to his lack of formal education. In fact, da Vinci’s writings are ridden with misspellings and amorphous sentence fragments, just as Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte showed in their manuscripts. So, did their imperfect language skills overrule their force of imagination and contextualizing it in words? Does this betray that language shapes thought?

McWhorter can transcend the demarcation of race in the communication of this extensive knowledge about the subject drawn from a wealth of learning and scholastic industry with urban wit and debonair guy attitude to his readers, academic or general. His intelligence freely crosses over time gaps, chasms between class divide across continents and oceans with a universal theme of words that we, as human creatures, have spoken thus far. And he tells it using full of scintillating metaphors, examples, and anecdotes, which helps the reader comprehend otherwise monotonously academic subject without pressure and enjoyably. Samuel Johnson said that the possession of knowledge is to share it, and the possessor of the knowledge shines when he applies the knowledge to the crowd of life. Well, Word on the Street shows it all.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN AFRICAN-AMERICAN LINGUIST LOOKS AT “BLACK ENGLISH,” & OTHER TOPICS

John Hamilton McWhorter (born 1965) is a linguist who is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.

He wrote in the Introduction to this 1998 book, “Several years ago, I spent a memorable Thanksgiving dinner trying to convince twelve African Americans that there was such a thing as ‘Black English.’ Most of them were offended that I would claim that there was any difference between black and white speech other than slang… and they were perplexed that I would say that phrases like ‘She my sister’ were systematic language rather than just a[n]… in-group bad habit. After three hours I managed to elicit some grudging agreement… I have come to see [such incidents] as a wake-up call to the field of modern linguistics. The reasons that linguists … do not see dialects as second-class language, and reject the idea that people walk around committing errors in fluent speech all stem from a few basic principles about language that are… quite easy grasp.” (Pg. 1-2)

He explains, “among the most valuable insights linguistics has to offer American society today … [are] the following: 1. Any language is always and forever on its way to changing into a new one, with many … [things] we process as ‘sloppy’ and ‘incorrect’ being the very things that will constitute the ‘proper’ language of the future. 2. Because a language changes … any language is actually a bundle of dialects… 3. … language mixture is a natural and inevitable part of how languages have changed, now change, and will change… 4. No language has ever changed in a way that contravened basic logic, and what looks ‘illogical’ in one language or dialect inevitably turns up as par for the course in the most elevated speech in some other language… The simple aim of this book is to present these basic principles in accessible fashion in order to help bridge the gap between linguists’ perception of language and the public’s.”

He suggests, “The simple fact is that languages do not allow genuine unclear usages to become prevalent. Linguists have discovered that languages, like certain ovens, are self-cleaning, and tend to nicely fix up any true impediments to comprehension that language change occasionally accidentally creates.” (Pg. 75-76)

He acknowledges, “I… as an avid theater fan, can say that while I have enjoyed the occasional Shakespeare performance and film, most of them have been among the dreariest, most exhausting evenings of my life---although only recently have I begun admitting it.” (Pg. 91)

He argues, “We are told that because it is a plural pronoun, ‘they’ must not be used to refer to single persons because it ‘doesn’t make sense.’ However, the fact is that today, ‘they’ is indeed both a singular and a plural pronoun, as indicated by the fact that all English speakers use it so… the language has changed and made it so.” (Pg. 121)

He observes, “Black English is exceedingly difficult for people who haven’t grown up speaking it to imitate. Think about it: how many whites have you heard who did a really spot-on imitation of Black English? The Black English ‘sound’ eludes even the most gifted white mimics… this is to say that Black English has a sound system that is … complex and is unique to it. During the O.J. Simpson trial, one witness for the prosecution claimed to have heard a ‘black voice’ shouting behind the fence around Nicole Brown Simpson’s home. The defense lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, successfully had this statement disqualified as evidence, claiming that ‘there is no such thing as a black voice’ and that the very implication was racist. In fact, however, Cochran got away with murder on that one. There is indeed a sound system unique to African Americans, which is why most Americans, and especially black ones, can almost always tell that a person is black even on the phone...” (Pg.132-133)

He acknowledges, “As a rule of thumb, the depth of one’s Black English correlates with level of education: Black English gets diluted among African Americans with more education and thus more face-to-face contact with whites.” (Pg. 147)

He notes, “I and other linguists who work on African-derived language varieties are often asked about the roots of Black English in African languages… The purported link between Black English and African languages is a bit of a scam… The truth is the links between Black English and African languages are very broad and very few. If Black English is to be brought into the classroom, it cannot be on the supposition that Swahili with English words is being spoken in North Philadelphia.” (Pg. 157)

He considers “the frequent claim that Black English does not mark the past tense… Many African Americans would be surprised to learn that there is no past tense in their in-group speech, given that sentences like ‘I go to the store yesterday] sound more like a foreigner than a black American. In fact, such sentences do not exist in Black English, and it is because the dialect indeed marks past tense, just like standard English. The absence of pas marking … is due not to an underlying African structure but to a sound system that avoids consonant clusters at the end of words. This system turns ‘walked’ … into ‘walk’ because ‘kt’ is a cluster. However… the speaker has marked ‘walk’ with past marking in their heads.” (Pg. 165-166)

Perhaps surprisingly, he states, “I believe that bringing Black English into the classroom… would in large part be a well-intentioned but misguided policy.” (Pg. 205) He adds, “why, if Black English is such a barrier to black children in school, is rural Southern white English not considered a similar bar to scholastic achievement in standard English? Poor and rural Southern whites use most of the same sound patterns and sentence structures as African Americans.” (Pg. 211) He points out there have been no fewer than nine other such… professional experiments testing the use of Black English in teaching reading to first graders through fourth graders. Contrary to the oft-heard claim… in all nine of these studies… dialect readers and contrastive analysis had NO EFFECT on African-American students’ reading scores. This means that for every study supporting the bridging approach… there are three that conclusively do not.” (Pg. 220)

He argues, “Hopefully, school boards will resist pressure to incorporate pseudoscholarly propaganda from certain Afrocentric writers, such as that ancient Greece ‘stole’ its philosophy and technology from a ‘Black’ Egypt, that Jews dominated the slave trade, that world history is reducible to an eternal crusade against the black man, etc. … An overwhelming amount of research … has shown that any unbiased person comparing Afrocentric history with the actual evidence is forced to conclude that many of these books are one part shoddy research and one part outright fabrication. There is no evidence that Cleopatra a Socrates were black. There is no evidence that Greek thought was an importation of Egyptian thought… It has never been documented that Aristotle traveled to Egypt… the simple fact remains that the core of this Afrocentric history simply is not true.” (Pg. 240-241)

This book will be “must reading” to anyone studying Ebonics, Black English, and other English dialects.

[Erin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great book from John McWhorter, my favorite linguist.

The book starts with an informative and fairly concise explanation of how languages in general change over time, with examples to illustrate. I love his analogy of how often we perceive language as a clockwork, with dialects as examples of language breaking down, while language is actually like a lava lamp, constantly changing. And just as you wouldn't tell a lava lamp that its changing shapes are "wrong," differences in dialect and language changes in general aren't "wrong."

At this point, I will admit that I am a recovering prescriptivist. It's largely been through John McWhorter's other books that I have seen the error of my ways. I long ago let go of "whom" and the injunction to never end a sentence with a preposition with relief, and fully embraced "whole nother." Well, in this book, I was forced to come to the realization that "Billy and me went to the store" is actually correct, when I had been preaching "Bills and I went to the store." In contemplation of this, I'm pretty sure at this point that the distinction of less and fewer falls squarely in the prescriptivist camp.

Next he comes to Shakespeare. I freely admit that I love the Bard, and am particularly fond of his comedies. This is the only time I have ever really disagreed with McWhorter. He advocates for translating Shakespeare's plays into current English for current theatergoers, so more people can truly enjoy Shakespeare. If someone really wants to tackle this task, have at it, but, let's be real; it won't be Shakespeare anymore. Its the same reason poetry is devilishly difficult to translate. You will always lose something in translation. Furthermore, McWhorter grossly overstates the difficulty of Shakespeare. Even the examples he gives of the opacity of Shakespeare's plays were not that difficult for me to understand. I'll freely admit that I am not a Shakespeare expert, and there are plenty of words and phrases I don't understand, but I do get the gist of everything Shakespeare I have read and heard without having to resort to annotations, and I don't think I'm in any way uniquely capable at this.

But it's all right; the next chapter addresses plural use of they, them, and their. I feel so vindicated! There is no reason why they, them, and their can not be both singular and plural. After all, "you" is both singular and plural, and "you" used to be only singular.

After that comes the bulk of the text, a discussion of Black English. Unfortunately, Black English is often associated with poverty, and its speakers are characterized as uneducated and unintelligent. McWhorter gives excellent examples and comparisons to show that Black English is a full-fledged dialect of English and is in no way inferior to standard English. It's also important for our understanding to note that Black English did not evolve from standard English. Rather, it developed alongside standard English. In fact, (and I kind of knew this, but hadn't really thought of it this way), there has never, at any point in the history of English, been just one thing that we could call "English." English has always been a collection of dialects. Anyway, I really enjoyed McWhorter's discussion of how Black English evolved from nonstandard British dialects, and the comparison between Black English and the English creoles found primarily in the Caribbean.

Then John McWhorter fearlessly wades into the controversy over Black English in schools, and let me tell you, he pulls no punches. He has no patience for race-baiting, glorification of victimhood, or teaching false history in the name of instilling pride in young African American students. He is also very frank in how schools are failing these students and what they can do to improve. His suggestions include teaching teachers about Black English, so they don't look down on it, celebrating African American history and culture in the curricula, and not correcting students when they speak in Black English. It's easy to see how being corrected on every other word would cause young African American students to shut down and decide that school is not for them.

This book was really interesting and informative to read. I also hope to use what I learned in my teaching. Word on the Street is a great read for linguistics enthusiasts and educators alike.

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was just wonderful. I’ve read books about the folly of prescriptive grammar but this is the first one that moved beyond discussing it as an abstract concept. McWhorter shows us how we came to glorify the English of yesteryear and denigrate the current one by ignoring the constant change that dominates all language. In one of the best, and most honest, discussions regarding the language of Shakespeare, McWhorter makes the argument that it is sheer folly to pretend that Shakespearean English is intelligible to a modern audience. He dissects some of the most famous lines in Hamlet to prove the point that we are robbing Shakespeare of his wit by insisting on reading it in the original language. He makes the comparison with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and how we have accepted that we can only read them in a Modern English translation (aside from the academics that decide to devote their energy to mastering Middle English). He similarly dwells on the reality of a language being a range of dialects and highlights the social stigma of the non-standard ones, especially Black English. He highlights the way in which Black English has been misunderstood simply because people refuse to recognize the reality of non-standard varieties of English as English and place all sorts of moral judgements on it. His discussion on the way that Black English has been blamed for the educational disparities between African-American children and their white counterparts is nothing short of phenomenal. After finishing this book, I can’t help but think that this book should be a required reading for any English-speaking person.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Good Look at English.

A linguist looks at English and explains that it is not falling down a rabbit hole. Languages change and alter the way they are spoken and written all the time. He also looks at Black dialects and find they’re still English. He advises a way to teach standard English to them.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Starts off very well and is worth reading for the first few chapters. Later the author gets bogged down in making arguments to contradict other academic writers, and it gets a bit boring.

[Moriah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very interesting viewpoint. Author does a good job explaining the nuances of a field other spend decades studying.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book provides lively look at several aspects of modern English from a linguist's perspective.

The book starts with a few chapters discussing the myriad ways that languages and dialects change over time. McWhorter shows that languages are not static and immutable, rather they are constantly evolving over time, like a lava lamp, to use one of McWhorter's favorite metaphors. These opening chapters are pretty much a shortened version of McWhorter's more recent book, The Power of Babel.

Through most of the remaining chapters, McWhorter discusses different aspects of modern English through the lens of language change. There are discussions of a lot of (sometimes) controversial rules that some "authorities" try to propagate, with McWhorter arguing that these rules are generally pointless. It's hopeless to try to preserve old bits when the language has moved past them (e.g., "whom"). Likewise it's pointless to fight against new evolutions in language ("hopefully" and the use of "they" as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun).

More interesting for me was the chapter on Shakespearean English. McWhorter describes how often Shakespeare uses language that is, essentially, foreign to the modern audience. Mostly this is a matter of word meanings and idioms. But McWhorter argues that many of us have to work so hard to understand a Shakespeare play (in the theater) and miss so much of its meaning that we really should be performing Shakespeare in translation---translation into modern English.

The final three chapters of the book are devoted to a discussion of Black English. The book was originally published shortly after the 1996-7 controversy over the teaching of Ebonics in the Oakland schools. And in many ways it is largely a vehicle for McWhorter to make his argument about this issue. McWhorter pokes holes in many linguistic misconceptions surrounding the debate and offers his views on the pedagogical challenges of teaching kids a new dialect at school and discusses the larger hurdles facing Black English speakers in American schools.

All in all, this was an entertaining, informative, and thought-provoking book. Some of the sections on Black English feel a bit dated, as they are focused on rebutting arguments that were put forth 15+ years ago. But even so, it was still a good read.

In reading the book, I was disappointed that McWhorter didn't draw some connection between his chapters on the folly of prescriptive rules in grammar and usage and his chapters on Black English. It seems to me that both of these issues touch on the topic of how language is used as a marker of class and status. McWhorter rightly argues against people who disparage Black English as linguistically inferior to Standard English. At the same time, he acknowledges the value in teaching everyone to speak Standard English. While the prescriptivist rules about split infinitives and "hopefully" may not have a solid linguistic basis, I would argue that they are examples of the same issues that come up with Black English. Failure to follow these rules can be viewed as an indication of inferior education, intelligence, and social background---just as many people treat Black English. Thus, to the extent that these rules are followed to sound like the educated and elite, it doesn't matter whether they have a sound linguistic basis.

On a completely different note, I found the cover photo on the hardcover edition of the book puzzling. It is a black-and-white shot of a city street in the late afternoon, with long shadows throwing everything into relief. Obviously this ties in with the title of the book, The Word on the Street. What's funny about it is that somebody obviously wanted to emphasize the canyon-like effect of looking down a city street and stretched the picture to make it longer and narrower. The result, however, is that all of the cars and trucks on the street are oddly out of proportion.

[Camilla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed the first half of the book, which was humorous and lighthearted and endlessly entertaining as the author discussed the differences between prescriptivism and descriptivism and the basic pursuit of linguistics in general. It felt like I had transported myself back into Varieties of English, which was possibly my favorite undergraduate course. Then I hit the chapters on Black English. Don't get me wrong--I'm as interested in the argument over Black English as I am every other topic addressed in the first few chapters. The difficulty lay in the extent of the argument in this book. I didn't understand based on the title (which I feel is misleading since it doesn't specifically address the controversy of Black English as being the main focus of the book) that this book would be a written rebuttal of the 1996 Oakland School District decision to teach Ebonics as a stepping stone for black children on their way to better reading and writing scores. John McWhorter, the black linguistics professor from UC-Berkeley and author of this book, did not agree with the school district's decision.

He proceeded to dedicate 140 pages of the 260-page book to laying out his reasons for disagreeing, which were valid and plausible and well-researched and persuasive. I agreed with him on many points and admired his eloquent writing as he did so. He did spend some fifty pages laying out why and how Black English is its own language and then spent the following fifty pages laying out why and how Black English is merely a dialect of standard English and isn't different enough to warrant an entire foreign-language course for Oakland, CA students to take. I was a bit confused about that.

I now feel enlightened on the Ebonics issue. I remember growing up hearing my family scorn the idea of teaching a substandard, ignorant dialect. I now understand better that teaching Ebonics in school is still a lame idea, but only because treating the Black dialect like an foreign language won't serve to increase reading and writing scores in standard English for black students, which is the entire point. As McWhorter outlined in his book, there are several other more relevant causes for low test scores and Black English is not one of them.

Overall I enjoyed the first hundred pages, was interested in the next 160, and would probably not recommend the book for those looking for a light read.

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I give this a mixed review. Parts of it are excellent. I like the beginning where he lays out the ways that languages change. The chapter on singular "they" is excellent, short and sweet. The chapter introducing Black English is also good. Chapters I don't care for -- the one on Shakespeare makes a good point (the English of Shakespeare's time is different enough to need translation for presentation for contemporary audiences) but is excruciatingly long. (Where was the editor?) The Black English chapter is followed by two more that go into great detail about whether or not Black English has significantly different grammar (and especially influence from West African languages) to be considered that distinct -- his own take on the Ebonics argument -- and to require special accommodations in the classroom. And he also gives his perspective that inner city African-American anti-school culture is what is causing the most problems for African American kids, not language differences. He's entitled to his perspective, but the complicated politics of this and the debate on AAVE origins make this too complex a work for a casual audience, especially for freshmen, IMHO. The polemical, persuasive tone doesn't bother me when the point is fairly accessible (don't feel insecure about your language, all languages change, down with prescriptivism, all dialects are equally valid!) but when he gets into the specific politics of whether or not AAVE has creole origins, or the culture wars over Black schooling and inequality, it seems to be too specialized on the one hand and too complicated politically on the other. Also, as I've suggested above, it is inconsistent in style and tone. It just doesn't hang together as a whole. So I'll use a few chapters from this in my freshman class, but wouldn't use the whole book. Having read or skimmed parts of about four of McWhorter's books now, I admire his passion and his ability to write books so quickly, but I'm frustrated that none of them really works for me as a text for the general beginner.

[Riah · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book just pretty much isn't worth reading. The take home point is that the English we actually speak is fine. This is broken up into three sub ideas. 1) If a finicky grammar rule makes something sound awkward, ignore it. 2) Shakespeare should be "translated" into modern English so people can understand it. And 3) Black English is English. The first point makes sense but isn't exactly groundbreaking, the second I disagree with very, very strongly and the last is painfully obvious (although apparently whether Black English was English or a separate language, requiring bilingual education treatment in schools was a controversy in 1996, which led to this book). I picked this book up because it said it would consider English's lack of a gender-neutral third person pronoun, but the chapter on it was so slight as to barely register. Basically he says "just use they because everyone does anyways" and that's it. So I was disappointed.

[Mahala Helf · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read the final 3 chapters for a poignant and personal interpretation of one man's experience as well as practical but unproven suggestions on how to improve elementary school teaching of African -American students. His evidence for the success of immersion was purely anecdotal(even though it fits my experiences, too).
Prof totally convinced me Black English is a legitimate dialect of English to be cherished, but African only in rhythm/sound.I enjoyed the comparisons with Creole(his field of study) . the beginning chapters were labored & repetitive, although his points could have been fascinating
Seems like a wonderfully caring, conscientous guy trying not to get put in a box. He really gives respect to other viewpoints, presenting them well.

[Ushan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essays on English, specifically on African-American Vernacular English. McWhorter says that it is a dialect of English, about as far from normative English as the Nottinghamshire dialect of English spoken by Lady Chatterley's eponymous Lover, which is not very far. It has nothing to do with creoles; there is a creole language spoken on South Carolina's Sea Islands, called Gullah, which is similar to Jamaican Patois, but the vast majority of African Americans never spoke it even during slavery. Slave speech is attested in much early American literature, and the only slave who speaks something like a creole is Jupiter in Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug, which is, unsurprisingly, set on an island off the coast of South Carolina.

[maybe · Rating 3 out of 5]

Compact and entertaining. It's posited as a challenge to the notion of a "standard" American English, and that it surely is. There are many occasions when the author is given ample opportunity to delve into the politics of language and to discuss the social (and political, economics, etc) aspects of language pedagogy and standardization, but it rarely happens. l A lot of times the writing finds itself ever so lightly lost in its swaths of trivia, none of which are *too" tangential and all of which are juicy enough to keep the show going on their own.

[sologdin · Rating 2 out of 5]

great idea for a book, though a bit to be desired in the execution. that said, I used it as the master text in a course for undergraduates on the myth of standard English. supplemented it with a history of English (which makes the point handily about the absence of standard English), hughes' swearing, smithermann's talkin' and testifyin', and the chapter's in eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction that discusses the rise of English as a discipline. good class for me, though the students hated me by the end, poor bastards.

[John]

Very, very good, but I got sidetracked and had to send it back. I do like Mr. (Dr?) McWhorter's style of writing though - very good blend of linguistic scholarship and popular understanding. I will read more by him, happily.
The biggest thing I got from this (and professional "linguists" are probably not surprised by this, but it was new to me) was the idea that "standard" English is still, despite it's historical dominance, a dialect. Everything is a dialect, but some of them win.

[kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Totally necessary for anyone who would even attempt to criticize modern American language...I was never overly concerned with or interested by lingustics before reading this, and I've certainly made a turnaround since.

Though I don't necessarily agree with the Anglicist paradigm in black vernacular, McWhorter still provides engaging and relevant arguments (whether you agree or disagree).

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought provoking. I never thought about English this way and I liked the detailed refutation of treating Black English as just another variation of English. I read this a little bit every day over breakfast. It was a great way to start the day.

[Rick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Most of McWhorter's arguments are cogent, but I still don't agree with his overall claims. Nonetheless, I think Jill needs to read the last chapter for her dissertation (if, for no other reason, than to have something to argue against).

[Raphael Paulian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very reader friendly

[Dave Haskins]

Language,English

[Mx. Whisper]

DNF sorry :(