A lot of the most vivid language, I find, often comes from the street. I mean that in the broadest sense--that language that's alive comes from places where people (black, white, brown, yellow, whatever) are living close to the ground. Perhaps I've just spent too much time around those sorts of people. But I swear, I've heard some of the most evocative language come from the most formally unlettered people.
I thought about this yesterday, while I was listening to another David Blight lecture. He started quoting from Bailey Wyatt, a freedman at an early Union League meeting, and I was just spellbound. Blight has a cool voice, but it was the words that got me:
We now as a people desires to be elevated, and we desires to do all we can to be educated, and we hope our friends will aid us all they can. I may state to all our friends and to all our enemies that we has a right to the land where we are located. Why? I'll tell you. Our wives, our children, our husbands, has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon. For that reason we have a divine right to the land. And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn and of cotton and of tobacco and of rice and of sugar and of everything? And then didn't them large cities in the North grow up on the cotton and the sugars and the rice that we made? Yes, I appeal to the South and to the North, if I hasn't spoken the words of the truth. I say they have grown rich, and my people are poor.There are all sorts of things wrong with that passage. But there is something beautiful about the extra "s" on desire, especially placed in a sentence like "and we desires to do all we can to be educated." And then this phrase, "the lands we now locates upon." Again, all sorts of things wrong with that sentence, but something about it's immediacy, its understatement, and maybe it's very wrongness.
I used to be a djimbe drummer. I thought it was going to be my life, at one point. The best lead drummers would play in such a way that they sometimes almost sounded off-beat--not off-beat like a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, but off-beat like a guy who can hear pockets in the rhythm that you can't. It's the same for great dancers. The same for hip-hop. Great MCs hear more.
Not saying that old Bailey was Rakim. But he heard a little more....Or maybe I'm just making excuses for my own grammatical failings.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
This is poetry in the best sense of being evocative, salt of the earth as we used to say, and his language makes his case for their connection/rights to the land and the moral authority that can come from life experiences hard won, tested and true, speaking of talking about slavery what do we make of the Senate's apology for slavery in the US?
"And then didn't we clear the lands and raise the crops of corn and of cotton and of tobacco and of rice and of sugar and of everything?"
That's such a great line. The repetition really gets at the nature of the work; the exhaustion and the exasperation are so noticeably embedded when you read it out loud.
TC,
Great post. As an awkward white nerd who went to a racially and economically diverse grade school, I used to marvel at the language of the cool kids. Stupid people were sprung junkies, old cars were hoopties, and there was a word - lost now in memory - for low quality sneakers that could make you cry it was so evocative and mean.
That's only a sampling. I've forgotten more than I remember - the in-language was always on the move - but I do remember being dazzled and wondering where these phrases came from. It seemed so natural, so cool, and at the same time impenetrably mysterious.
Language had a fashion, and you could always tell who was on the outside by their last-year speech.
You're probably thinking of bobos.
Bobos
They make your feet feel fine
Bobos
They cost a dollar ninety-nine (or nickel and a dime)
Heh, I remember that rhyme, but for us it was "rejects," not "bobos." I had a few pairs in my day.
In NYC, we called them "keds." Same rhyme but keds would replace bobos. Skippy's was another term we used. Children can be brutal, so lawd help the kid in my neighborhood who stepped out of his house with a pair of keds/skippy's on his feet -- the whole block would follow behind him, chanting the rhyme, at the top of our lungs. Disgraceful.
sponduce[pronounced spawn-duece]- the act of taking, swiping.ex: I got sponduced last night. Also used as a verb to legtimize taking an item, ex: Sponduce, he yelled as he took my chocolate milk.
origin- Lancaster Intermediate School, ca. 1986.
I know exactly what you mean by the english language, I have spent many days wondering where these lovely words came from.
I think I will take the day and think on it more...SIKE!
Lancaster, as in south of Dallas? I taught 8th Grade Science there for four months, until I realized that it was slowly destroying my will to live...
Thanks for all of these Civil War/Reconstruction posts. They have been fascinating and beautiful.
Since you just got through Battle Cry, I highly recommend Eric Foner's book, Reconstruction (if you haven't read it already). It picks up many of the themes you've been discussing over the past couple weeks.
The vernacular can be spectacular, ignore it at your own risk, but I ask you, T-NC, when will all the cool kids start saying "fisk?"
It reminds me of Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
Part of the beauty, too, I think, is the truth behind the poetic language. Maybe deep truth--especially sad truth--evokes poetry.
TNC-I'm not sure if you're familiar with Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words, but if not, you might enjoy it. It's from the 80's, but reissued lately--an anthropological study of the language acquisition of two tiny, rural NC mill towns, one White, one Black, and what happens when the children-who acquire language through very different methodologies--attend school together.
I read it many years ago, and it still comes to mind occasionally, especially as I think about the differences between what the book presents as the White culture of teaching overt names and meanings-and rewarding their correct use--vs. the Black culture of allowing language to develop more naturally--and rewarding poetic interpretation.
You can guess which method reigns in the school.
Flannery O'Connor was great at catching southern (white) idioms. My favorite sentence in American lit, from "A Good Man Is Hard to Find": "Everything is getting terrible." And of course: "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."
Yes! Old southern idioms, white and black, always blow me away.
Yes. Especially powerful presented in contrast to the sharp-as-a-hatchet narrator's voice.
"Bailey turned his head sharply and said something to his mother that shocked even the children."
Just vicious, and incredibly brilliant.
i agree, i like the metaphorical bent in black vernacular english. it makes it hard to create though. more than just repurposing or reviving words, it repuroposes ideas, saying "seed" when you mean "child," or saying "pushing a whip" when you're "driving a car"
in defense of jourdan anderson: even if he couldn't read or write, he still spoke english all day, every day, and who's to say he didn't know his way around his own mind well enough to communicate his sarcastic, threating, funny and standoffish views to his ex-master.
What about the strong oratory tradition in the black church? (yes, i bring up this establishment again. yes, as a positive historical force) There is a history of black preachers who couldn't read but nevertheless analysed christianity and critiqued social evils like slavery.
Its funny. My whole family came over from Grenada and one thing about a lot of Grenadians is that even though they have their own very distinct dialects, they can often be very snobby and judgmental about African American dialects.
I grew up here, in DC specifically, and one of the more fascinating things to watch has been the gradual transformation of my family's speech patterns. This is especially true in my mother's case as she adapts more and more Black DC colloquialism into her everyday expressions. Its difficult to express just how much she used to disdain this "ignorant" speech. To hear her now speak as if she grew up in Anacostia makes me laugh every time I hear it.
Part of it is, I think, just the normal process of assimilation but I think a very big part of it is that she recognizes the expressiveness in a phrase like "I ain't trying to hear that." This sort of thing has been happening with my entire family for the 25-30 years they have been here and its truly fascinating to behold.
It's funny, I saw that part of the lecture and personally I was also struck by the beauty of the language. In addition, I found it fascinating when Professor Blight said something on the effect of "he was making the argument for the labor theory of value, of course he didn't know what to call it but he knew what it was."
Sometimes we put too much emphasis on formality. What's the dictionary definition of X? Not saying that definitions aren't important, but often in refusing to listen to people because they are what some consider uneducated, we miss the insights that people gain through experience.
Personally I know this firsthand, having grown up in an Indian church I can tell you that the best speaker I've ever seen in person only had a fifth grade education. However, Crow was his first language and he captured the oral tradition and ways of explaining things to people in personal way in which everything was understood.
Thanks for this.
I wanted to get that part in about the labor theory of value. I got distracted. But you're right, it was a great point.
Yech! Slavery sucks! It violates the principles of enlightened energies that we must develop in order to "survive ourselves" out into the cosmos. Viva the enlightenment poetry.
I agree with you entirely. There is a unique genius, a polygrammatic poetry that has always and will always come from those who have the talent for self-expression, but are unconstrained or only partially by the rules of letters.
I often lament the near extension of the Southern black patois of my grandparents generation. The expressions that they used -- "knee baby" for the middle child; "grasshopper," for a man who runs the street and so many other phrases that don't come immediately to mind. My great Aunts and Uncle's use of language always hit me as genius, the evocations were always so straightforwardly metaphorical. Practical poetry. It's a knack that's easy to lose.
Aw, great post, TNC. "I'm Swayze" -- that just made me break open in a grin. And that Wyatt speech is beautiful--the cadences of his sentences sing out at you, and somehow the syntactical "wrongs" give it an added dignity.
A couple of things you might like are the writings of S.J. Perelman, who was an artist of vocabulary both formal and street (and damned funy to boot--he occasionally wrote for the Marx Brothers) and the film Ball of Fire, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck as, respectively, a dictionary author writing an entry on slang and the nightclub singer/gun moll he enlists to help him. It's pretty delicious and, as I was reminded by "I'm Swayze," where a gangster tells Stanwyck to get him "on the Ameche," -- or telephone, because Don Ameche played Alexander Graham Bell in a contemporary biopic.
"On the Ameche" is full of win.
"Ball of Fire" is one of the great under appreciated classics, not least because of the language. And btw, I don't think there is one, not one, thing wrong with the sentences. TNC, add my thanks for your series of posts on the civil war, also one of my husbands passions. He recently orded "Capitol Men" after reading some of your posts.
I do like that moment where you see an old piece of writing and the language is strange and all of a sudden it just clicks and you get to see the world as it was. Next best thing to a time machine, no?
He seyde, "Syn I shal bigynne the game,
What, welcome be the cut, a Goddes name!
Now lat us ryde, and herkneth what I seye."
And with that word we ryden forth oure weye,
And he bigan with right a myrie cheere
His tale anon, and seyde as ye may heere.
Really, I just wanted an excuse to post that bit there though.
May be a weak simile, but language, in this regard, is like food. The best food in the world was created by poor cultures who had to take the least desirable parts of the animal (or vegetable, for that matter) and make something beautiful out of it.
When you get right down to it, oxtail is better than filet mignon.
Make sense?
dylan
Them that ain't been poor joke about eating government cheese while those that have say "That's some damn good cheese."
I'll go with the oxtail, but can't agree on the cheese.
A few years ago at one of the campuses where I work at, I overheard one young woman complaining to her friend about a boyfriend--"the man," she said, "could use some more bone."
My granmother, a transplant from North Carolina, used the most interesting and beautiful expressions. She only had a 3rd grade education, but she never failed to get her point across with clarity, and, oftentimes, humor.
When I was a kid, she would often say to us, children, when we were being especially rambunctious: "I ain't studin' you." It took me many, many years to figure out her use of the term studin', meaning studying you (I am ignoring you) or I am not "paying you no mind" -- another great AF Am expression, I think.
Another great term, I recall her using is keeping a "roof over head." (No matter what, you must always have a place to live and not get thrown "out of doors.")
In an earlier thread above, a commenter mentioned some cool terms from old moview. Being a classic film buff, I love the the language used in the gangster films with James Cagney (Public Enemy and Angels with Dirty Faces) Phrases like: "Let's blow this joint" (a phrase I often use myself) and "Scram." Or the use of the terms "dame" or "moll," to describe a women of questionable character. Great stuff.
"I ain't studin' you." Lord, if I had a dollar for every time I heard that one from my mama(pbuh), I could retire a rich man.
There's a theory out there that the word "krunk" is derived from the Yiddish word "krank," which means sick or ill, and that black kids in the Atlanta area got it from old Jewish storekeepers. It's probably not true, but the possibility that it is true is pretty cool, particularly since Yiddish is itself a kind of language of the people in the way that Black English is, so if the etymology is legit, it's actually a kind of third generation word, from the German krank to the Yiddish krank (which was probably pronounced more like krunk) to the Black English krunk. From Goethe to Benny Goldfarb the shoemaker to Lil' John.
can we also talk about the use of the word "trifling," (meaning some old b.s. that i don't want to deal with), which can be shortened to trife. My pet theory is that it's also adopted from the yiddish, "treif" meaning unkosher, unclean...
I think this is a possiblity because blacks and jews both suffered from redlining housing segregation. In some places, Jewish ghettos became black ghettos. On Cleveland's East side, for instance, you can find black churches whose buildings have the names of prominent Jewish intellectuals carved into its stones. You can see the population shifts following the old outlines of segregation.
Anyway, I don't think it's just Cleveland, but other areas where blacks and jews mix. possibly new york as well?
I wish it were a corruption of Yiddish.
The more simple explanation is as a conjunctive of "crank"---"let's get this party crankin' until its CRUNK." As in "I drank until I was drunk"
Sorry I meant subjunctive. My ignorant behind...
well, urban dictionary has like 8 million plausible etymologies for it, including that Conan O'Brien made it up as a replacement for fuck that he could say on TV.
but yeah, I'll stipulate that crunk as the subjunctive of crank is more plausible than the corrupted yiddish theory.
btw, I also always wonder about trife/trifling/treif when I hear it in songs. Is it possible that the words have the same root if you go back far enough? Or is it just a nice synchronicity?
Walter Wangerin, Jr., who is a midwestern, white, pastor (he was a Lutheran growing up), writes a story about how just after his grandfather had died, his mother in a fit of grief embraced him and told him that he was his grandfather's "spitting image." Because Wangarin's grandfather was a highly accurate tobacco spitter and would show off that ability to him for entertainment's sake, Wangarin wondered what the heck the "spitting" business was about in that phrase.
Decades later, as a pastor, he was consoling a woman in his parish about the death of her husband, and talking about her son to her as well, when the woman, a black woman, from Mississippi or Georgia, said, yes, he's the "spee-it 'n' image" of his father. Wangarin got it then--the phrase had its origins in another phrase, spirit and image. Yet it turns out that there is also a rhyme of meaning in the elided pronunciation. There's something so essential about the spit in our mouths. It's easy to see how "spitting image" became exact replica--soul, spirit, and body.
Also interesting because in the Egyptian creation myth, spitting is how the Universe was created by Nut, the sky mother of all.
This is so strange - TC, I had no idea that you had posted anything about language, but I was reading David Foster Wallace's essay/review of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage (this essay can be found in his book, "Consider the Lobster") and was thinking for some reason about you - likely because, I think, of the singularity of your voice and style in the relatively homogeneous (read, White) panoply of writers and bloggers who are in the mainstream, or at least have securely funded organizations behind them...you get my point...
Please, please, if you have not already, get your hands on a copy of this brilliant DFW essay. I would love to hear your thoughts, or at the very least to know that you had had a chance to absorb the lessons and thoughts of that great wordsmith, Wallace.
cd...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7kP35jI7Go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bojnqBFadz4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeFUvW5YInQ
A coupla more thoughts for you TN:
First from the intro to Invisible Man, when Ellison's protagonist talks about Louis Armstrong on "What did I do to get so black and blue," how Louis would get inside of time.
The second from the Queen, Zora Neale, at the beginning of Their Eyes when she was breaking down an evening parlay--"These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long...But now,....They became lords of sounds and lesser things....They made burning statements with questions, and killing tools out of laughs. It was mass cruelty. A mood come alive. Words walking without masters; walking altogether like harmony in a song." Words walking without masters.
LOVE that passage from Invisible Man.
Didnt he smoke reefer or something like that and then listen?
Another dynamic is that the poor and unlettered often have an intimate but ambivalent, if not adversarial relationship to the more landed and lettered (middlemen / owner) classes. They often find the need to form code in which to communicate, and by which to retain the identities that are often menaced or outright assaulted by cultural and political pressure from above.
IOW the same reason that cockney rhyming slang was devised, is the same reason Cuban slaves learned to build on their ancient African religious beliefs via Catholicism, which is the same reason American GIs communicate in profanity and acronyms, which is the same reason Five Percenters communicate in philosophy and acronyms.
Its all about talking circles around the Man in code, over his head but right in his face at the exact same time.
I like this part the best: "For that reason we have a divine right to the land." How many times in the history of the world have the poor, the dispossessed, and the despised been the ones to claim the mantle of divine right from the kings and lords of the world?
Maybe there's an oral tradition/written tradition dynamic working here too. A writer tends to work alone, refining an argument, recasting a phrase. But the writer is limited to the use of only one mind - her own. Reading, travel and life experience expand what the writer has access to in her mind, but it's still one person's experience.
Street language, it seems to me, is more like brainstorming. There are multiple minds and life experiences available. You say "I'm ghost", and someone else who saw the movie on TV last night makes the connection to say "I'm Swayze." It's a communal genius that maybe one person can't possess alone. An added bonus is that if, as Juba said, you also need to mask what you're saying in a kind of code, a code that is based on shared experience can change and adapt - and be pretty much a mystery to someone with a different experience. Unless, of course, she's Barbara Billinsley in the movie Airplane.
"But what I really want is the kind of genius that takes "I'm leaving" and turns it into "I'm ghost" and then takes "I'm ghost" and turns it into "I'm Swayze."
This reminds me of something similar from the 80's: "I'm outta here like the Audi 5000" to "Audi" to "5000". A buddy of mine still signs off with "5000" in his e-mails.
Great post. I grew up in Oakland and I always agreed with the notion that Ebonics is not a lesser form of English, just sort of a separate dialect. I knew many people that were incredibly articulate, clever and linguistically creative when they spoke Ebonics, though mainstream society would find what they were saying incomprehensible and assume it to be gibberish.