Walter Williams: Axe Me a Question

[quote]jtrinsey wrote:

[quote]goochadamg wrote:
Anyway, doesn’t this depend upon the context? Should a student be reprimanded for writing that way in a formal paper? Yes. Should he be “corrected” while conversing this way in a casual situation? Absolutely not.[/quote]

Well I think Headhunters is doing his usual trolling and I’m dubious as to the legitimacy of that quote. In any case, I’m not defending poor language skills, I just felt like adding a random tangent. I’m all for proper grammar.

However, I would say that there is a big difference between, “He axed me a question,” and, “I be wiff him.” The latter is poor grammar while the former is (in spoken terms) simply poor pronunciation. Somebody who says, “He axed me a question,” isn’t showing poor language skills, just a dialect, similar to a northerner saying, “What’s this all aboot?”. Somebody who says, “I be with him,” is showing poor language skills and that should be corrected. [/quote]

I respectfully disagree. The use of “I be wiff him” is quite possibly slang. I say “what the fuck” a lot, and while I’m not the best at expressing myself through words, it’s pretty clear that I’m reasonably articulate. “What the fuck”, formally, makes no god damned sense at all: it’s not grammatically correct. Just because I use such a nonsensical phrase doesn’t mean I lack the ability to communicate effectively or am unable to think about language at a “high level.”

In an informal context, when the people around are familiar with it, a student should not be corrected for using slang. Slang is how our language evolves, IMHO.

And yeah, Headhunter isn’t really worth taking seriously. :wink:

Since this is a headhunter thread, it’s probably stupid of me to post here.

The aks/ax pronunciation has a much longer history than people realize:

Walter Williams (btw) is an utterly brilliant black man and prof at George Mason.

“Williams is an outspoken champion of black education and private school vouchers, indicting the public education system, as perpetrating “a fraud against African-American students and families by lowered standards.”[citation needed] He is also a critic of the minimum wage and affirmative action, believing that both practices are detrimental to both blacks and liberty. Williams especially emphasizes his belief that racism and the legacy of slavery in the United States are overemphasized as problems faced by the black community and do not adequately explain the situation blacks face today.”

I’m not discounting the fact that he said that, I find it dubious that teachers are instructed to not correct poor grammar as recounted in the passage.

Maybe it’s just the optimist in me.

Fine with me. Less competition in the workplace. Everyone has the power and the responsibility to do what’s best for themselves and their future. If they choose to be “cool” rather than qualified, hey, who am I to come to their rescue. I run my own business, I would never hire anyone who couldn’t and/or doesn’t read, write, and SPEAK English properly, and race has nothing to do with it.

[quote]imhungry wrote:

[quote]LarryDavid wrote:

[quote]imhungry wrote:

[quote]LarryDavid wrote:

[quote]imhungry wrote:
[/quote]
OH SHIT![/quote]
[/quote]

Oh-Oh-W-What are you sayin’.[/quote]

It’s not unusual…[/quote]

LOL…it wasn’t an actual question, just another meaningless exclamation in the vein of my earlier “OH SHIT!”.

I have the impression that people in general just do not grasp that, well, people in general instinctively or otherwise-automatically judge a person’s intelligence very largely by how they sound while speaking.

Just as very many people have fawned over Obama’s estimated (by them) vast intelligence and “powerful intellect” derived not from his graduating with middle-honors from Harvard law school, and certainly not from any intellectual accomplishments even though he was in academia for a number of years so one would expect to find something, but from how his voice sounds as he reads from a Teleprompter.

You hear his voice, and the natural instinctive response is “This man is really highly intelligent: a powerful intellect.”

Which is more than you’d think just from someone having graduated Harvard law school with middle honors. There, you’d assume “intelligent” but not in any fawn-all-over-him way. It would be assumed to be in the ordinary range for a lawyer.

The flip side is true as well.

People can and will promptly estimate a person as having low intelligence from how they speak, too. Whether their estimation is correct or not. And it is not an easy thing to change this impression. Win the Nobel Prize in Physics and they will likely change their view, but ordinary things will be unlikely to do much.

Now, if someone thinks it’s a great idea and what they want to do to have people “misunderestimating” their intelligence and having considerable resistance to upgrading that estimate, that’s their prerogative of course.

However, a point of educating children is to guide them to their advantage in ways that in some cases may be different than what they may, at these earlier years, themselves think best.

[quote]jtrinsey wrote:

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
It is very likely that a person with poor language skills will suffer significant deficits in other areas of academic competence such as mathematics and the sciences.
[/quote]

This is my main beef right here. In my studies, I have known a few Asbergery kids who can barely speak and some Asians who can barely speak English and they do just fine in the math department.

Actually, I would bet that in most graduate schools, people with a good, solid command of the English language are outnumbered by those who’s English is tenuous at best.[/quote]

Sorry, but I have to do it (Interweb rules) ^ “whose” not “who’s”.

As for Asperger’s sufferers, an unwillingness/inability to have normal two-way conversations isn’t the same as an inability to use proper grammar/pronunciation etc.

From healthandgoodness.com
Signs and Symptoms of Asperger’s Syndrome include:

* Lucid speech before age 4 years; grammar and vocabulary are usually very good.
* Monotonous, rigid or unusually fast speech.
* Conversations revolve around self.
* Engaging in one-sided, long-winded conversations, without noticing if the listener's reactions.