-=> Quoting Frank Topping to William Lipp to Frank Topping to Matt Smith <=-
 
 FT> ...one of your earlier postings quoted an individual -- school
 FT> principal, I believe -- as saying to the effect that maybe ones
 FT> grandmother would be  able to understand them at 
 FT> home speaking Ebonics but it wouldn't cut it in the real
 FT> world.  ...I quite agree that Ebonics isn't the medium of
 FT> commerce in America but I question deeply
 FT> whether a person  making such a statement has values that Americans
 FT> should respect at all.
 
 WL> Let's see if I've got it right.  You think they won't be able to get
 WL> a job, but only an insensitive cad would say so.
 FT> No, I saw it as being demeaning to the maternal line of the family and
 FT> holding a rather negative and narrow view of family relations.
Maybe I'm missing some code phrase here.  Is it demeaning to suggest
that Black English might be spoken in the home?  I thought that was
the whole point of the Oakland School Board.
 FT> To my way of thinking a chat with ones grandmother is about as REAL 
 FT> as we can get in this world.
Ohh - maybe you're just objecting to the implication that the
the "real world" is a different place than the "world of family
relationships."  But that's just railing against the idiom - when
students are worried about having to go out into "the
real world," they always mean the world of commerce.  Surely you
don't mean to demean the dialect of English that uses this idiom.
 
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