Customer Reviews

A History of American English (Longman Linguistics Library)

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He was a linguistics teacher, researcher, educator, and writer. He taught at Northwestern University in Matchitoches, Louisiana, and has written a book about the Creole slang.

Joey Lee Willard gives a history of America from Yankee (2nd language) being Pidgin in English and part Dutch. He ventures into drinking, smoking, gambling, and chewing tobacco (nothing to do with language) and advertisers, politicians, and other hucksters -- which are dated by now.

Mountain Men & Cowboys are in a class all their own. I was educated by the chapter on Black Talk. Didn't know when I perused it that he has written more than one book on that very subject. But I learned enough in this one. Shocked and repulsed by their sexual slong and jazz (jive) talk, and how some of it was transferred to the white world through the hippies and rebels of the Sixties, Elvis Presley's songs, and the Beatles of Britain with their drug-related songs. Manson ordered his followers in California to kill innocent people as his drug-crazed mind used a Beatles' song for his dementia.

Black talk goes back to slave days, when they had to do double talk to fool their masters, and the spirituals with the double meaning and 'disguised messages." They associated with African cults (their own vresion of KKK)in 'Steal Away' and preached 'liberation,' revolt (in 'Judgment Day'). His teaching of how they talk to their own peers is still the same today. They do it here on the public buses where most of the drivers are black (nowhere else could they get away with it!) -- they ignore completely white women with white hair as if they are not there. On the other hand, I have observed that if the elderly white woman is the only passenger, they are courteous and are able to communicate on a 'white' level until, that is, a black person gets on. They automatically revert back to Black talk, bad grammar, gossip about other blacks -- even drugs -- and personal happenings, as if they are on the street. Blacks leave out verbs and use too many "that"s; his version of 'loud talking' was amusing as here they yell instead of talking.