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A fyoo duhzen ambishuhss intelectchooals, a handful ov British skool teechers and wuhn rokit siuhntist ar triing to chang the way we spel. They are the leaders of the spelling-reform movement, a passionate but sporadic 800-year-old campaign to simplify English orthography. In its long and failure-ridden history, the movement has tried to convince an indifferent public of the need for a spelling system based on pronunciation. Reformers, including Mark Twain, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt, argued that phonetic spellings would make it easier for children, foreigners and adults with learning disabilities to read and write. For centuries, few listened, and...

Greetings of IMANI (FAITH) President McKinney: May our Divine Creator and Beloved Ancestors find you and the extended family in the best of spirit and health. Welcome back to the land of the original OHLONE people, to what is currently called the “california bay area.” It is so disappointing not to be able to greet you personally this weekend—when WE are commemorating the birthdays of freedom fighters EL HAJJ MALIK EL SHABAZZ (Brother Minister Malcolm X), Mother Yuri Kochiyama and HO CHI MINH—due to a previously-scheduled family commitment. However, it was a pleasure to speak to you briefly after the...

FReepers, what do you think about requesting Cal Thomas or someone like him to address the "Gutter Language" now infesting much of our political discourse? We, meaning others and myself have grudgingly been forced to know about vulgar meanings of words that before now had no use in our everyday conversations. Last week my nine-year-old third grade daughter came home and asked me what Mack Daddy meant. I asked her where she heard the word and she stated that "the other night on television news a man called someone a Mack Daddy". I told her the man was probably talking...

I'm eavesdropping on a locker room conversation, one guy showing another his girlfriend's picture on a cell phone, a younger man talking about how he struggles to find reliable help for his restaurant, another talking about his nephew playing in a big all-star game in Las Vegas, three others piping about woman trouble, an older man cautioning against contradicting an officer of the law. And I'm lost. Everybody in the locker room in this YMCA is speaking English, and, at times, I feel as if I can't understand them. "I'm telling ya, bruh, both y'all's messed up." "Turn up the...

HOUSTON (AP) - A school district suspended a police officer as it investigates his distribution of a "Ghetto Handbook" and the three-month lapse before top district officials were informed of it. The eight-page booklet, subtitled "Wucha dun did now?", was handed out to about 15 Houston Independent School District police officers at a May meeting, district spokesman Terry Abbott said. Officials declined to identify the officer who handed them out, but said he had been ordered to attend diversity training. A supervisor immediately collected the booklets, Abbott said, but district officials said they didn't learn about the incident until someone...

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday she sees her sometimes Southern accent as a virtue. "I think America is ready for a multilingual president," Clinton said during a campaign stop at a charter school in Greenville, S.C. The New York senator—who said she's been thinking about critics who've suggested that she tried to put on a fake Southern accent in Selma, Ala.—noted that she's split her life between Arkansas, Illinois and the East Coast. Clinton added a Southern lilt to her voice last week when addressing a civil rights group in New York City headed by the Rev....

I did a search and didn't find this posted in the past on FR. I also checked Snopes and found this is TRUE. They're standing on the corner and they can't speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk: Why you ain't, Where you is, What he drive, Where he stay, Where he work, Who you be.. And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it's important to speak English... except these knuckleheads. Mushmouth is what they speak! You can't be a doctor with that...

Actually, it's sad. The Rochester City School District has moved to “normalize” ebonics, saying that “Black English Vernacular” is as valid as conventional English and that students and teachers are welcome to use it. Teachers, in fact, are even encouraged to use ebonics themselves in the classroom. It's part of the multiculturalism and diversity cult. The belief that all things are equal, even when they clearly aren't. And the deep thinkers at the worst school district in the state have decided that their students will have better self-esteem if their “home language” is respected in school. A recent district newsletter...

(Rochester, N.Y.) – It’s called Black English Vernacular – or more commonly – Ebonics. In a newsletter to staff, Rochester City School District officials say it is okay for students and teachers to speak Ebonics in class. The newsletter is called Diversity Dialogue. It suggests teachers use BEV to communicate with students. It says teachers can: • “Switch into BEV in specific situations or informal discussion.” • "Translate common phrases in Standard English into BEV.” • “Read and retell stories in both BEV and Standard English.” “We need to embrace the diversity they bring into our schools,” said the district’s...

VICTORVILLE —Victor Valley Union High School District teachers have been coached on a new approach to disciplining students. At issue is whether teachers need to adjust how they interact with and discipline students who misbehave, particularly students from difficult backgrounds. Culberson, director of youth services for the San Bernardino City Unified School District, said at a back-to-school inservice meeting that students today have less respect for authority than they did when many teachers were in school and consequently, some teachers have unrealistic expectations of their students. The district superintendent, Julian Weaver, said Culberson’s message does not represent a change in...

IN the last few years, it has seemed that perhaps America's long-buried history of blackface is being allowed to peek out of the closet. Bob Dylan named his most recent studio album "Love and Theft," after Eric Lott's landmark 1993 study of the form; and in his curious 2003 film, "Masked and Anonymous," Dylan even got Ed Harris to "black up" for a scene. Spike Lee also explored the subject in "Bamboozled," and competing biographies of Stepin Fetchit joined "Where Dead Voices Gather," Nick Tosches' meditation on the minstrel superstar Emmett Miller, on bookshelves. "Old Dan Tucker," the opening track...

Fresh from rehab, Rep. Patrick Kennedy said yesterday he wants to be treated like an African-American from Washington if and when he gets charged for crashing his car on Capitol Hill. Denying that he was drunk and or that he asked the Capitol Police for preferential treatment, Kennedy, a Rhode Island congressman, said he's prepared "in terms of bookings, in terms of mug shots, fingerprints, whatever they might have me do." "It's what anyone else would have done to them if they were an African-American in Anacostia," Kennedy said in a shaky voice, referring to the mostly minority neighborhood in...

A man who tried to force his way into two houses on Friedland Church Road was shot dead this morning, a spokesman for the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office said today. The sheriff's office is investigating the shooting and did not release the names of anyone involved. Sheriff's officers were trying to obtain search warrants this afternoon. Sheriff's Capt. Brad Stanley said a man tried to force his way into the front door of 2804 Friedland Church Road, where a woman who may have been his former girlfriend lives. The man shot off the locks of the front door with a...

NEWPORT NEWS - A student says, "Janae need a marker." How does a teacher respond? Usually this way: "We don't say, 'Janae need a marker.' We say, 'Janae needs a marker.'" What the teacher needs is a new approach, according to two local educators promoting an alternative way of teaching grammar. "I would say, 'We're in school right now. We're speaking formal English. How would you say that formally?'" said Rachel Swords, a third -grade teacher at Newsome Park Elementary School in Newport News. Swords and Rebecca Wheeler, an associate professor of English at Christopher Newport University, have co-written a...

BRITAIN’S most senior policeman Sir Ian Blair is facing a race relations dilemma after the release of figures that reveal almost half the number of people arrested in relation to car crime in London are black. Blair, the Metropolitan police commissioner, has signed off a report by his force’s traffic unit which shows that black people account for 46% of all arrests generated by new automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) cameras. The technology allows car registration plates to be scanned and automatically run through databases to determine whether a vehicle is stolen, uninsured or has not had its road tax paid....

Democrats sought to turn gas prices — like Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war — into an issue that hurts Bush's standing with voters. "What happen to Iraq oil, Mr. President? You said Iraqi oil would pay for the war. Ain't seen no money. Ain't seen no oil," Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland said.

Someone needs to sit our people down and have a healthy discussion about the names we as African Americans are giving our children. We are hurting our kids and putting their futures in peril from the moment they are born. That’s right, I said it. We are KILLING our kids and crippling their futures with the names we give them. Don’t you want your kids to get JOBS someday? Good jobs, and serious careers? With a name like Jaquez Ja’Quan Diante’, you’re dooming your sons to a life of drug dealing on some seedy street corner. Our Black men face...

Did anyone notice the ebonics correction last night on Hannity & Colmes? A black man was on to talk about how he opposed white organizations supporting black history month. He said something like "we're just givin' it to ya back." Then Hannity said "Giving it to you back? Is that what you said?" I was surprised to hear that on TV. You'd think Sharpton and Farrakhan would be in an uproar.And then at the end, the guest held up the "black power" fist, but his hand was just offscreen. Hilarious.

E-mail Author Send to a Friend Version January 27, 2006, 8:23 a.m. You Go, Girl! A missing consonant and the race card. By Mark Goldblatt Something about that clip of Hillary Clinton insisting, in front of a predominantly black audience on Martin Luther King Day, that Republicans were running the House of Representatives like a "plantation," had been gnawing at me for almost a week, and even after replaying the video over and over again — ah, the curse of the Internet! — I couldn't quite put my finger on it. I knew it wasn't the comparison of congressional...

Mandisa likes Abercrombie & Fitch, not FUBU. She speaks proper English, not Ebonics. She takes honor classes and belongs to the Beta Club and National Arts Honors Society at Parkview High. She plays the violin and has danced and sung in area productions of “The Nutcracker” and “My Fair Lady.” Mandisa Surpris, a 15-year-old sophomore, is all this. And she’s black. Some of the other black students don’t know what to make of her. The way she dresses, the way she talks, the grades she earns. She’s an anomaly. To them, she’s more white than black. They’ve even told her...

The San Bernadino, Calif. high school district is now discussing the implementation of Ebonics – the street language of young African Americans – to be taught as if it were a foreign language. This is sheer idiocy, and anybody who would even consider such an outrageous idea has certainly never been to Africa. This Ebonics nonsense will do nothing but hold back black youngsters, keeping them behind such immigrants as the Vietnamese, who are struggling to make their way in a nation whose language they know they must learn to get ahead. When I read this Ebonics story I recalled...

A Brooklyn College professor says Ebonics is superior to the tongue of White Devils --Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College --Teaches that rap music is an effective tool for teaching English literacy to schoolchildren, and that proper English is language of white "oppressors" --Required students to view Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 Priya Parmar is an Assistant Professor of Adolescence Education at Brooklyn College's School of Education in New York, where she teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses to aspiring teachers. Of special interest to Parmar, whose doctoral dissertation is titled "KRS-One Going Against the Grain: A Critical Study...

It’s easy to understand the vernacular of a Montanan. While there is an accent of sorts, a bit of a flinty, semi-drawl with colloquial phraseology, you never wander off scratching your head over the location of the next branding party. Big Sky residents prefer an economy of words, and a simple “yup,” or “uh huh” or “reckon so” can speak volumes. Folks in South Florida also possess understandable diction. The homogenizing population boom of the lower Gulf has basically eliminated twangs, guttural noises, clicks and whistles. The only time you can’t comprehend the words of a south Floridian is if...

I've submitted an opinion piece to the San Bernadino Sun. I shouldn't have to explain why I was compelled to comment; I think you'll understand as soon as you start reading: Ebonics Suggested For District By Irma Lemus Staff Writer SAN BERNARDINO - Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist. The goal of the district's policy is to improve black students' academic performance by keeping them interested in school. Compared with other racial groups...

Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist. The goal of the district's policy is to improve black students' academic performance by keeping them interested in school. Compared with other racial groups in the district, black students go to college the least and have the most dropouts and suspensions. Blacks make up the second largest racial group in the district, trailing Latinos. A pilot of the policy, known as the Students Accumulating New Knowledge Optimizing...

 the dismal scienceA Roshanda by Any Other NameHow do babies with super-black names fare?By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. DubnerPosted Monday, April 11, 2005, at 3:32 AM PT <SNIP>These are the sort of questions that led to "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names," a research paper written by a white economist (Steven Levitt, a co-author of this article) and a black economist (Roland G. Fryer Jr., a young Harvard scholar who studies race). The paper acknowledged the social and economic gulf between blacks and whites but paid particular attention to the gulf between black and white culture....

Just watching MSNBC for a minute. They had black Democrat Morris Brown and a black administration Republican on discussing the "contraversial" appointment of Karl Rove to the Assistant Chief of Staff position. Talk shifted to Howard Dean. Money quote: (Brown) "I think that Dean will follow the tenaments of Ron Brown." Could he have meant 'tenets"?

PIKEVILLE, Ky. (AP) - A new class that seeks to teach youngsters how to lose their Appalachian accents has set off an age-old phonetic debate: Should mountain natives drop the drawl or hold tightly to their twang? The class, put on by an eastern Kentucky theater group, is designed for children in middle and high schools who want to reduce their accent to "broaden their performance opportunities and improve overall marketability." "We don't want people to be held back just because they have an accent," said Martin Childers, managing director of Jenny Wiley Theatre in Prestonsburg. "If you want to...

LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) - It didn't take a nuclear physicist to realize changes were needed after a $40,000 ceramic mural was unveiled outside the city's new library and everyone could see the misspelled names of Einstein, Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo and seven other historical figures. "Our library director is very frustrated that she has this lovely new library and it has all these misspellings in front," said city councilwoman Lorraine Dietrich, one of three council members who voted Monday to authorize paying another $6,000, plus expenses, to fly the artist up from Miami to fix the errors. Reached at...

WASHINGTON — Protesters delivered a message yesterday to the national spelling bee: Enuf is enuf! Members of the American Literacy Society picketed the 77th annual spelling bee, which is sponsored every year by Cincinnati-based Scripps Howard. The protesters' complaints: English spelling is illogical, and the national spelling bee only reinforces the crazy spellings that they say contribute to dyslexia, high illiteracy and harder lives for immigrants. "We advocate the modernization of English spelling," said Pete Boardman, 58, of Groton, N.Y. The Cornell University bus driver admitted to being a terrible speller. Protester Elizabeth Kuizenga, 56, is such a good speller...

I never got Fat Albert. Dumb Donald wore a lampshade for a hat, Russell dressed like a bag lady, and Bucky appeared to be the victim of a back-alley orthodontist. Bill Cosby's distorted, funny-looking kids couldn't shoot fire from their hands, and they wouldn't know a weather dominator from a flux capacitor. Instead, they were a dumb and dumpy bunch who conquered the travails of life (deodorant? candy overload?) with one simple weapon—Fat Albert's formidable moral center. I thought about that moral center last week, when Cosby ventured down to Washington and ripped into the have-nots among us. The occasion...

NAACP leaders stunned by remarks of prominent comedianPosted: May 20, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com In the presence of NAACP President Kweisi Mfume and other African-American leaders, comedian Bill Cosby took aim at blacks who don't take responsibility for their economic status, blame police for incarcerations and teach their kids poor speaking habits. Cosby made his remarks at a Constitution Hall event in Washington Monday night commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision that paved the way for integrated schools, reported Richard Leiby in his Reliable Source column for the Washington Post. Leiby said...

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni keeps '60s spirit intact for a new generationBy Tyrone BeasonSeattle Times staff reporter Nikki Giovanni may be a 60-year-old cancer survivor with a respectable teaching job at Virginia Tech University, but her opinions; and hair; are as edgy as ever. A cornerstone of the Black Arts literary movement in the 1960s and early '70s who sported an Afro when Afros were social statements, Giovanni still looks hip with her new, don't-mess-with-me platinum locks. And Monday, when the poet and activist pulled up the left sleeve of her sweater in an auditorium filled with 500...

Random Thoughts On The Decline Of English Bile, Vitriol, And Lost Clauses January 5, 2004 Being as I am a shade-tree writer, tinkering with these essays as with a ’54 Merc on blocks behind the garage, I find myself grieving for what was once quite a language. English grows ugly and lapses into deformity. My mail creaks under the weight of misused pronouns and homeless participles. People seem to spell by ear: “Your” and “you’re,” “it’s” and “its” are mixed like salads. The young assert that “me and him was talking,” and really don’t know better. Perhaps three people...

A book written with truth, wisdom and insight shouldn't be revolutionary.  Unfortunately, reporting facts about black America can be downright subversive.  In his new book, , Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson ("the other Jesse") tells it like it is.  He is the founder and president of the successful non-profit  (BOND), whose purpose is "rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man".Rarely do I come across writing as brutally honest as my own when dealing with the black community.  Liberals in general won't like it, liberal blacks in particular will hate it, and conservatives will wonder what took so long.  SCAM is a...

A white literacy coach is under fire for reading a black man's essay on the N-word at a Brooklyn seminar and using African-American diction and mannerisms in her performance. According to a report in Newsday, Jill Bloomberg read "The 'N' Word: It Just Slips Out" at a local high school, hoping to stimulate discussion among several high-school literacy coaches in attendance at the Oct. 10 event. Instead, her performance caused several black attendees to walk out. "It was like watching Al Jolson do 'Mammy,'" Cathie Wright Lewis, a 21-year teacher and literacy coach, told the paper. "It was like getting...

He was one of the people who gave us "Ebonics" in the 1990s. But don't hold that against him. John U. Ogbu also helped bring attention to the self-destructive tendency that drives some black students to reject standard English and academic excellence as "acting white," as if ignorance were supposed to be a black thing. The distinguished University of California at Berkeley anthropologist most recently made news when a group of black middle-class parents hired him to examine why their teenagers were not succeeding academically as well as their white counterparts. After careful study, Ogbu concluded that the black parents...

ROCKVILE, Md. (AP) - Former Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose reached a deal with the county ethics commission Tuesday that clears the way for him to write a book and pursue a movie project about the sniper investigation, his attorney said. Moose resigned last month, but his departure did not resolve the legal dispute over his book about the three-week manhunt following the sniper attacks that terrorized the Washington area last fall. The county ethics commission had argued Moose could not write his book - even if he had resigned - saying he would be unfairly profiting from his...

<p>TODAY, San Francisco and Oakland school board members will make clear whether they believe schools to be havens for learning or tools for leftist propaganda.</p> <p>In Oakland, the public schools will conduct a teach-in on a possible U.S. war on Iraq. While organizers claim that they set out to present both sides, authors of a press release for the teach-in couldn't even feign balance as they noted that fifth-graders from Sequoia Elementary wrote letters to President Bush opposing the war, and invited Bush to their school, where, as one student noted, he could "learn some (conflict resolution) skills."</p>

<p>Oakland -- After three years under Superintendent Dennis Chaconas, who turned the Oakland public schools into a national model of urban school reform, California's sixth-largest school district is broke and headed for the most expensive takeover in state history.</p> <p>The 48,000-student district will ask the state for an estimated $100 million bailout. Board members say they will have to consider laying off teachers, increasing class sizes and closing some schools to save money.</p>

My self search...or, "My Comments" is jammed. Keeps showing "New Posts to You" even though I'm read them all.

The Languages of the Classroom The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. Edited by Lisa Delpit and Joanne Kilgour Dowdy. The New Press. $24.95. Most people remember the Ebonics affair as one of the more ludicrous episodes of PC revisionism. In December 1996, the Oakland School Board issued a new curricular policy, officially recognizing "West and Niger-Congo African Language Systems [Ebonics], and each language as the predominantly primary language of African-American students." Teachers were asked to "immediately devise and implement the best possible academic program for imparting instruction to African-American students in their primary...

"In the five years since the Oakland debacle, with the help of a media white-out, so-called ebonics may have faded from the public's consciousness. But during the same time, the Afrocentric warlords dominating inner-city schools have continued their campaign to enslave poor, urban black children through teaching them racism, while refusing to teach them English."

By CATHERINE CLABBY, Staff Writer Rural African-Americans increasingly speak the urban-sounding dialect called ebonics, even when their grandparents sound like their white neighbors.That helps explain how the distinctive tongue is spreading nationwide, two N.C. State University linguists say.NCSU researchers Walt Wolfram and Erik Thomas analyzed interviews with working-class blacks and whites born in coastal Hyde County, where regional speech long has reigned. Two generations back, members of both groups shared the distinctive Pamlico Sound dialect that calls a "high tide" a "hoi toide," the linguists found. But as younger black men and women are exposed by travel, television and pop...