Posted by Ed Garren Ray Charles Robinson, another genius from our swamps, was repeatedly referred to as a "Bama" by his non southern peers. Ray made all of us from Florida proud, as did James Weldon Johnson, Mary McCloud Bethune, Zora Neale Hurston, all of whom spoke in "dialect". Come to think of it, Bob Graham, recently retired US Senator from Florida (who voted against the war in Iraq), is no idiot either. Get him around the "home folks' for about an hour and his "dialect" will start coming out too. And yes, the books wouldn't work in the mid western urban "dialect" because those folks are so painfully literal as to take ALL of the spice and sugar out of language and reduce it to the essence of tofu, nutritious, but having virtually no flavor of it's own. As Jimmy Carter often said, Southerners don't talk "different", the rest of you do. Regards, Ed
on 2/9/2005, 2:46 am, in reply to "dialect?"
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As someone who grew up less than 50 miles from Eatonville, in the hills and swamps of eastern Pasco County Florida, when are all of the rest of you going to let go of this "Dialect" thing? You don't refer to Bronx english as "dialect", you don't refer to the painfully nasal tones of Chicago english as "dialect", why do you belittle the beauty of Southern speech, both black and white as "dialect"? Perhaps you should read Zora Neale's comments to her publisher regarding this issue. They are in "Seraph on the Suawnee". I now live in Los Angeles, a place where half the population speaks English as a second language, yet no one refers to their "dialect". But God help the person who has a strong "Southern" sound in their speech. The stereotypes and invectives that get thrown at us would make your skin crawl. And it's as bad in the black community as it is anywhere else.
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