Author: admin

“I am crine, LOL. The Internets has no chill. I want let my self of steam be hurt by the constant shade. So, I minuswell join in and pay Amish to the best of Black Twitter!” This translates to “I am crying, laugh out loud. The Internet doesn’t hold back on telling it like it is even if it hurts someone’s feelings. I won’t let my self-esteem get hurt by the constant ability of people “to covertly insult someone or something” (Luvvie Ajayi, blogger), so I might as well join in and pay homage to the best of Black Twitter!” – unintentional and on purpose

            Social media communities can represent a microcosm of face-to-face communities. As a member of Black Twitter, the African American community, Twitterverse, and American society, I straddle both worlds—the double consciousness that W.E.B. DuBois detailed in his work. As an English instructor and professional editor/writer, when I scroll through my Twitter feed or Facebook timeline I am delightfully amazed and appalled by the use of language and literacy practices by the African American community, which mirrors my day to day in-reality-face-to-face experiences. Appalled by the big “grammar police” offenses like not using the past tense of verbs, spelling “won’t” as “want,” using the wrong “there, their, they’re,” “whether, weather,” “no, know,” “whose, who’s,” “write, right” and “too, two, to.” There’s nothing worse than wanting to repost a meme and not being able to because of one of these grammatical grievances (or posting a disclaimer). But, in the scheme of things, are these offenses a big deal? Delightfully amazed by those who wear their sense of being “woke” as a badge of honor and cultural pride, sharing their awareness and insatiable appetite for knowledge through literacy practices.

“That’s such a forest,” my mom says in reference to how someone in the family is acting. I stop pecking away on my laptop. “A forest?”

“Yeah.”

“Like you can’t see the forest for the trees?”

“Yeah,” she says, getting visibly irritated even though she has repeatedly said she wants me to point out her quirky language issues. “He’s putting on all the time. It’s not for-real.”

“Ohhh, you mean farce.”

Blank stare. “That’s what I said, forest.”

“Are you saying forest or farce?” (which to her sounds like I am saying the same word)

“Forest.”

“Spell it.”

“F-O-R-E-S-T.”

I start pecking again on my laptop, doing a Google search. “I think the word you mean is farce, hold on minute. See” I say, pointing to the second definition: “mockery, travesty, sham, pretense.” She’s stuck on the first definition though: “a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay.” “Not that one,” I say. “Look at number two.”

“I’ve been saying the wrong word all my life?” My mom, a 62-year old retiree and former Air Force wife who has traveled the world but returned home to a small, Southern Florida town to live near family and enjoy her future golden years, is currently experiencing a communication breakdown and it is freaking  her out! “I used this word all the time at work, but, you know . . . I’ve never seen it in print. I’ve never written the word.”

We talk some more and then my daughter joins the conversation. The three of us have been discussing my mom’s re-emerging language difficulties. She says she is stuck in a time warp. She reverts back to speaking and writing patterns from her childhood because of her environment and like quicksand, she can’t pull her way out. In my mom’s professional career as a military store manager, her writing skills soared. She’s come back home and code switches and it’s affecting her verbal and written communication skills; however, the three of us are confused because apparently she used this word “forest meaning farce” at work. She can’t recall if her first use of the word stemmed from home.

Then, I say to my daughter. “I learned something new. I have never used farce in the context of the first definition.” And she laughs, because she hasn’t either. That’s why she was intrigued with our conversation. At this point, my mom thinks we are patronizing her and doesn’t realize that we are dead serious about not knowing the first definition of farce, which is the way my mom had always used it with her employees while working for military stores. My mom uses the word “farce” in the correct context and uses both definitions, however, says the wrong word “forest,” probably because that is how the word sounded to her when she first heard it, based on how the word was pronounced.

Even though she senses that something is grammatically wrong, the sticky tentacles of black dialect or African American Vernacular English (AAVE) cling tightly to her words. My mom is well read (she reads nonfiction such as magazines, online political news articles, and the Bible), but I don’t think she reads as much as she used to, so how does that relate to her writing skills? In her case, it is not because she sees it wrong. She is not seeing it written wrong; she is falling back into old habits and writing it wrong (or saying it wrong as in the case of “farce”) because of how she hears it in her head. She says that her writing has fallen off, but I don’t think that she has seen people writing these wrong ways recently. What has changed is how she hears stuff, so I wonder if hearing people speak with bad grammar skills makes her internalize all those “wrong” ways of writing. If somehow there is something in the brain that clicks and makes one remember those wrong ways of writing.

In my mom’s case, what is the difference in learning standard English grammar versus what she hears in her community? There are different dialects. I know from editing and tutoring adult learners and teaching freshman composition, people write like they talk, and it has nothing to do with intelligence. Do all people speaking dialects code switch? My mom is not good at code switching; however, I am. Why are some people more effective at code switching than others?