Amglish In, Like, Ten Easy Lessons_ A Celebration of the New World Lingo - Arthur E. Rowse [21]
Since then, American black lingo not only has managed to retain much of its distinctive character but has played a leading role in the gradual transformation of formal English into today’s informal language. The dees, dems, and dose of earlier centuries have morphed into a new vocabulary of words like dis for harass, hood for neighborhood, and kicks for shoes.
THE PC POLICE
At the same time, there has been a growing but largely hidden campaign to make educational materials politically correct. In keeping with the policy statements of teacher associations, such as NCTE and CCCC, many schoolbooks have been purged of any words deemed to be racist, sexist, elitist, or offensive to any other population group or perceived group.
Critics of such policies include Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and former senior associate commissioner of education in Massachusetts. In her 1999 book, Losing Our Language, she declares that such political correctness is undermining children’s ability to read, write, and reason.12
She cites a Scott Foresman reader for the fourth grade featuring an American family named Levin in which none of the members is related to any of the others. The two boys are Korean immigrants, each from different parents.
In 2003, Diane Ravitch, a former assistant secretary of education, focused further on this trend with a book entitled Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.13 Publicity for the book said, “If you’re an actress or a coed just trying to do a man-size job, a yes-man who turns a deaf ear to some sob sister, an heiress aboard her yacht or a bookworm enjoying a boy’s night out . . . [this book] has bad news for you: Erase those words from your vocabulary.”
According to Ravitch, even Aesop’s fable The Fox and the Crow was banned as sexist because a male fox flatters a female crow. Imagine if he had dissed her!
Ravitch’s book reveals the persistent social pressure in the United States to avoid even a hint of prejudice toward certain groups of people. The goal is to satisfy everyone, but the result may satisfy only a few. A happy medium is elusive.
WHY A TEXTBOOK WRITER GAVE UP
Author Diane Ravitch quotes an anonymous textbook writer who broke under the strain:
They sent 10 pages of single-spaced specifications. The hero was a Hispanic boy. There were black twins, one boy, one girl; an overweight Oriental boy; and an American girl. That leaves the Caucasian. Since we mustn’t forget the physically handicapped, she was born with a congenital malformation and only had three fingers on one hand. One child had to have an Irish setter, and the setter was to be female. . . . They also had a senior citizen, and I had to show her jogging. I can’t do it anymore.13
WHO NEEDS THE QUEEN’S ENGLISH?
Such pressures are especially resisted by creative writers. Novelist and poet Wolf Larsen wrote an essay titled “Who Needs the Queen’s English?” in which he said, “Language must be the servant of the writer . . . [who] should throw off the straitjacket of grammar whenever necessary.” He added, “Traditional grammar is not necessary in creative works. . . . Literature often has a rhythm that makes grammar unnecessary, just as a good verse has a natural flow that has made the rhyme obsolete.”14
He also attacked the alleged discriminatory nature of Standard English. “Why should the mode of speaking of the most privileged members of our society be considered standard English? Why shouldn’t the rich and constantly evolving language of poor blacks in the ghetto be considered ‘standard English’?” He added that hip-hop lingo is “far more exciting and rich in contemporary culture than the ‘standard’ English of Park Avenue.”
A SHOCKING AD
Even before the historic liberalization of grammar instruction by the NCTE in 1963, copy