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Split Thread Dialects, Slang and Grammar

angrysoba said:
You seem to be saying that slang is distinct from vernacular rather than a subset of it.
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Sweet baby Jesus, after all these posts, you're dropping the school marming and insults and getting honest? It's a belated Easter miracle!

Yeah, slang and vernacular aren't really that far apart, are they? In fact, if you consult Wikipedia's entry for American Slang, guess what pops up as one of the four types listed. Go on, guess. The other three are not called vernaculars, of course.

And that's the issue that you and others have been belaboringly arguing to the side of, tilting at your imaginary dragons. My objection, if you recall, was the claim that "woke" was (*strokes beard and adjusts spectacles*) "a common derivation from African American Vernacular English." Which is total bull ****. It's a black slang term. Proponents of it's puportedly ancient history are only able to find a couple rare usages of it spanning like a century, by a couple individuals. It's not part of the vernacular, bro. It's a very modern slang term virtually unheard of before COVID- ish times.

So why does that get me cranky? Because, if you would be so kind as to recall, posters here were saying there's no problem with using "woke" because it's not at all a vulgar slang used by lower class speakers (definitional, btw). It's a racist attempt to prettify it. And as I've said, I very viscerally dislike that, just like someone using "African American" when they mean "black American" is almost certainly a racist. Except, of course, for those who also say "European Japanese" or "South American British" or any other utterly horse **** descriptors that they would openly mock and ridicule.

Whiteys who are using "woke" unironically: just own it. Don't try to intellectualize what you're doing. Saying "I'm woke" is basically like your white ass saying "fo shizzle" with a straight face and expecting to be taken seriously. You're not pulling it off.
 
Thermal said:
Sweet baby Jesus, after all these posts, you're dropping the school marming and insults and getting honest? It's a belated Easter miracle!

Yeah, slang and vernacular aren't really that far apart, are they? In fact, if you consult Wikipedia's entry for American Slang, guess what pops up as one of the four types listed. Go on, guess. The other three are not called vernaculars, of course.

And that's the issue that you and others have been belaboringly arguing to the side of, tilting at your imaginary dragons. My objection, if you recall, was the claim that "woke" was (*strokes beard and adjusts spectacles*) "a common derivation from African American Vernacular English." Which is total bull ****. It's a black slang term. Proponents of it's puportedly ancient history are only able to find a couple rare usages of it spanning like a century, by a couple individuals. It's not part of the vernacular, bro. It's a very modern slang term virtually unheard of before COVID- ish times.

So why does that get me cranky? Because, if you would be so kind as to recall, posters here were saying there's no problem with using "woke" because it's not at all a vulgar slang used by lower class speakers (definitional, btw). It's a racist attempt to prettify it. And as I've said, I very viscerally dislike that, just like someone using "African American" when they mean "black American" is almost certainly a racist. Except, of course, for those who also say "European Japanese" or "South American British" or any other utterly horse **** descriptors that they would openly mock and ridicule.

Whiteys who are using "woke" unironically: just own it. Don't try to intellectualize what you're doing. Saying "I'm woke" is basically like your white ass saying "fo shizzle" with a straight face and expecting to be taken seriously. You're not pulling it off.
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Now you’re just lying.

This thread is not about the term “woke”. The thread is started because you think that AAVE is NOT a vernacular. You have said that throughout and beclowned yourself with your abject dumbassery. You claimed that AAVE is itself merely slang with broken grammar. There is slang within the vernacular, as I have said, so now, like some simple child, you have started doing some idiotic victory lap as if you cannot tell that a subset does not equal the whole.

Look, nobody cares that you don’t like the word “African American”. It is boring to hear you whine about it as if it is important or even relevant. You can call it Black Vernacular, if you prefer, as John McWhorter tends to.
 
angrysoba said:
I assume he did. It was broadcast on BBC Scotland, so either they would have paid for the rights, or perhaps there is some fair use loophole.
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Ah, makes sense. If he were just a random comedian making internet videos, he probably would have been hit with a copyright strike.
 
arthwollipot said:
While it is true that all answers are responses, not all responses are answers, and you didn't answer my question.
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My bad, then. I assumed your question to be rhetorical, and answered in kind. You say you are genuinely confused? Ok. Allow me to cite an obscure reference we call "Merriam-Webster". They use the phrase "Standard English", but I trust we don't need to get into a sidebar about synonyms:

noun
: the English that with respect to spelling, grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary is substantially uniform though not devoid of regional differences, that is well established by usage in the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated, and that is widely recognized as acceptable wherever English is spoken and understood
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https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Standard%20English

Does that satisfactorily answer your question?
 
the formal and informal speech and writing of the educated
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So if my informal speech varies from my formal speech I'm uneducated? A bold assertion. Oh it's an American company. The Oxford says
Standard English
A widely used term that resists easy definition but is used as if most educated people nonetheless know precisely what it refers to. Some consider its meaning self-evident: it is both the usage and the ideal of ‘good’ or ‘educated’ users of English. A geographical limitation has, however, often been imposed on this definition, such as the usage of educated people in Britain alone, England alone, of southern England alone, or the usage of educated people in North America and Britain generally.
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Wudang said:
Your regular reminder that Scottish speakers may be converging towards English but Scots languages (lalans, Doric etc) are Germanic languages which come from a common ancestor with English.
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That's brought up in this You Tube video about Limmy's language:

 
Wudang said:
So if my informal speech varies from my formal speech I'm uneducated? A bold assertion.
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That certainly doesn't follow from anything that I or M-W asserts. To communicate in Standard English, you would need some degree of education, conjugating verbs and parts of speech, etc. That education could be purely verbal, or more commonly taught in a school system. But it in no way follows that also adopting a regional dialect or slang vernacular or what have you negates that. Por que no los dos?

Oh it's an American company
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:D

Again, I'm not disputing the existence of vernaculars. As I've said many times, I use them myself. What I'm disputing is portrayal of AAVE as a distinct vernacular, when by my reading, it's far closer to a popular slang, and pointlessly being treated like a "special case". Most of the black people I know who are my age or older don't speak "AAVE ", and chide their kids about it who do (the adults do speak in what Wikipedia describes as AAE, African American English, which I alluded to earlier).

There's a subtext floating around here (not from you) that "all those black people are the same, descending from illiterate slaves in the south, so of course their families continue to talk like that for generations." That seriously gets under my skin, and what gets me cranky.

My grandmother was an immigrant from Germany, and spoke with a thick accent. German was spoken on her farm, and the town they lived near had more German printed newspapers around the time i was born than English. Yet my mother and aunts and uncles do not have a trace of accent, or retain any German vernacular speech. So why is it flatly asserted that black people generically do? Again, I don’t hear most older black people saying "I finna" do anything. Young black people adopt this affectation as young people's slang, like I did with my in-groups when I was younger.
 
Thermal said:
Again, I'm not disputing the existence of vernaculars. As I've said many times, I use them myself. What I'm disputing is portrayal of AAVE as a distinct vernacular, when by my reading, it's far closer to a popular slang, and pointlessly being treated like a "special case". Most of the black people I know who are my age or older don't speak "AAVE ", and chide their kids about it who do (the adults do speak in what Wikipedia describes as AAE, African American English, which I alluded to earlier).
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Slang is vocabulary. A word can be cleanly mapped onto another. A durrie is a cigarette. A dunny is a toilet. See you at the servo this arvo. AAVE has its vocabulary, but it also has its own set of distinct accents that are not shared by other American demographics. It also has a different set of grammatical rules. It's not just slang.

Thermal said:
There's a subtext floating around here (not from you) that "all those black people are the same, descending from illiterate slaves in the south, so of course their families continue to talk like that for generations." That seriously gets under my skin, and what gets me cranky.
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Understandable. AAVE isn't just one thing. But it is a distinct group of things. And it is the group of things that makes it a vernacular and not just a slang.
 
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