hook it onto your clitoris
You guys really, really didn't need to include spellings and whatnot to reproduce the vernacular
Ebonics, or African American Vernacular English (AAVE), is any of the nonstandard varieties of English spoken by some African-American people throughout the world (American Heritage Dictionary 2000). While the media, linguists and educators have debated whether AAVE is improper English or the markings of culture, for the qualitative researcher the issue is largely how to transcribe AAVE (Green 2002). In our study, the most common example was the use of “wif dat” rather than “with that.” Other examples included “ax” instead of “ask” and “bof uv em” instead of “both of them.”This may all seem largely beside the point, but folklorists, fieldworkers, historians, and social scientists deal with this question all the time, analyzing videos and recordings just like this one. We're humans too, and we're always filtering everything we see and hear through our own lenses of enculturation. We can never assume our ears are neutral, but we can aim for the most value-free representation of what people say by giving them the same benefit of the doubt I get even though I might say "agaynst" where other people "against". The discussion of dialect has been an interesting part of the group's response to this quick 9 minutes of video.
In our study, transcription of AAVE was initially handled naturalistically, depicting it verbatim rather than in SAE. During our reflection sessions, however, the appropriateness of this strategy was debated. On the one hand, if a naturalized approach was adopted, during member check, participants could become offended that they were represented in an insensitive way. On the other hand, if we used a more denaturalized method and “cleaned up” the transcript of AAVE, valuable data might be lost. During reflection we asked ourselves if the transcript would look different if the participant was the transcriber. That is, would they write “wif dat” or “with that?” We wondered if our research was respectful. Equally, we wondered whose perspective was being honored. While Schegloff (1997) argues that naturalism always honors the participant, this assumes that the participant hears his/her voice just as the transcriber does or is comfortable when they do not. We also needed to consider the potential influence of naturalized transcription on research team members. As stated earlier, we found that when AAVE was handled naturalistically some team members made assumptions about education level and socioeconomic status of African-American participants, resulting in potentially biased data analysis. Therefore, we had twin concerns about representation and suitability to our research design.
IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.And despite all this attention, there are still elements of Twain's dialect writing which contain inconsistencies. STill, he did it better than anyone.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
OMG! This is the most hilarious thing I've seen, ever! I especially love the part where she says “she spread her legs wide and she start screaming, sayin’, ‘yeah daddy, that’s it,’ or she might start cursin’ or screaming out all types of profanities ‘cause he doesn’t hit the bottom, and now her mind – she insane, her mind ain’t good because the penis done ejaculated all in her brain.” Wow! Maybe someone been puttin' whammies on her head!If so, good luck with that, too. You'll need it.
He was taping a sketch about magic pixies that embody stereotypes about the races... Chappelle thought the sketch was funny, the kind of thing his friends would laugh at. But at the taping, one spectator, a white man, laughed particularly loud and long. His laughter struck Chappelle as wrong... “When he laughed, it made me uncomfortable,” says Chappelle. “As a matter of fact, that was the last thing I shot before I told myself I gotta take fucking time out after this. Because my head almost exploded.”This is incoherent. Chapelle had a nervous breakdown. EB is just doing the standard white lib status thing. Antiracist one-upsmanship is always a cheap way for whitey to feel 'above the crowd', whether he has a valid point and evidence or not. Coz' there will always be other status seekers on the sidelines ready to pat you on the butt in their own attempt to climb the latter.
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posted by ODiV at 3:05 PM on April 17, 2007 [5 favorites]