Do You Speak American? — Vocabulary
Robert MacNeil and William Crane
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Some regional dialects have long enjoyed prestige; others suffer from generations of prejudice.†134 more

He believes that coming to a language late can be an advantage, because one brings better credentials, linguistic, cultural, and emotional.†44 more

Many authorities claimed that the nation could no longer assimilate immigrants in such numbers as in the past.†16 more

These negative attitudes find their focus in attacks on minority languages, which are all too obviously badges of ethnicity.6 more

Some distinctive expressions have been on the rise—for example, the use of weren't for the past tense in negative sentences regardless of subject person or number, such as "weren't me," or "She weren't home."6 more

Think, for example, of how you guys has now become a generic form of address: it is gender-, age-, and class-neutral, and decidedly informal.†11 more

In the 1720s, when they began migrating to America in large numbers, many landed in Philadelphia.†13 more

Paradoxically, the truth seems to be that, where change occurs, it is often creating more diversity, not less.†10 more

Surfer Dude or Valley Girl, the urban black language of hip-hop artists, or any of a dozen other regional or ethnic dialects that together constitute American English—some of them barely intelligible to one another?†11 more

In the right context, a split infinitive can look like the end of civilization as we know it.†6 more

But if our language stopped changing it would mean that American society had ceased to be dynamic, innovative, pulsing with life—that the great river had frozen up.†6 more

To communicate all of this, American language adapts.†5 more

Some regional dialects have long enjoyed prestige; others suffer from generations of prejudice.†9 more

They thought to solve it by substituting synthetic voices so clearly nonhuman that people would not succumb to gender stereotypes, but people still did.†8 more

Linguists would challenge Prince Charles on two grounds: First, the concept of "words that shouldn't be" is alien to the freedom inherent in English.†84 more

Take the common American expression come clean, to tell or confess everything, which originated in cant, or underworld jargon, and emerged as common slang in the 1920s.†5 more

Away from that intellectual battleground, ordinary Americans can be either gloriously relaxed about their language or, to use the popular idiom, decidedly uptight.†6 more

Wall faulted Bush, as governor of Texas, for not taking action, like cutting off state funds, after the El Cenizo ordinance.†4 more

Recently La Cucaracha has emerged as the title and chief character, a human-size cockroach, of a satirical cartoon strip syndicated in more than sixty American newspapers.†3 more

Simon's own strong emotions about the state of American English came to national attention in 1980 with his book Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline.†1 more