Dialect fluency as class destiny — the playground price of monodialectalism and standard English as the dialect of…
echoes
From: The Usage Wars — Bryan A. Garner + DFW, The Connection (WBUR, host Judy Swallow, March 30, 2001)
- Early text:
[scene] Wallace's testimony that he is affecting SWE
on air to signal education and congeniality, and will drop it on the
street in his rural Midwestern state [11:49–12:44]; that everyone makes
dialect adjustments constantly below awareness [13:07]; that nerdy kids
fluent only in teacher-pleasing English pay heavily in the social and
playground realms [13:14–13:29]; and that street speech judges slang and
argot fluency exactly as hard as boardrooms judge SWE — the judging just
never becomes the object of discourse [15:38–16:23]
- IJ echo: the novel's twin-institution class architecture (ETA's
hyper-lexical children against Ennet House and the street registers —
the yrstruly section, scene 040, pp. 128–135, and the Clenette section,
scene 008, pp. 37–38, run entire narrations in the dialects at stake)
- Weight: shared-preoccupation