Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
From John McWhorter
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.
Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.
Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?
As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.
Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
As far as I'm concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I'm not interested in white people loving me. It's an unrealistic expectation. Black people don't love anybody but themselves.
The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.
Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.
Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.
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