American - Writer | -
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.
John McWhorter
GoodQueenWorldYouPersonDrama
'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.
VoiceFaceYouWayTextingSystem
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?
ThinkYouLettersTalkStructure
Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.
SpeechNowWayTalkWriteTexting
Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
GreatBlackCallEnglishManyThem
People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
RelationshipPeopleBlackThinkSame
Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.
MenPeopleSpeakBlackYoungSystem
It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.
GoodMistakesHabitBlackThought
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.
BlackLanguageDropsEnglishSlaves
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.
TimeWalkPeopleLanguageYouLook
Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.
RacismDeadBiasesDefinitely
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.
LovePeopleMeBlackLovingWhite
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