Catchphrases flourish in contemporary American English.
Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.
Some people be game-goofy and words don't sound right coming out of their mouthpiece. But whenever E-40 says something it's just solidified.
Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.
Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.
'Irony' is such an over-used word.
People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.
In all my years in 'Countdown's' Dictionary Corner, the subject most guaranteed to rankle with our viewers is the presence of Americanisms in the dictionary.
Americans have different ways of saying things. They say 'elevator', we say 'lift'... they say 'President', we say 'stupid psychopathic git.
Slang is the speech of him who robs the literary garbage carts on their way to the dumps.
The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.
To speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do is style.
Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.
We just say things differently in Australia - like torch. I'd ask, 'Can I have the torch?' It seems to fall flat when I say, 'Can I have the flashlight?'
My characters don't talk necessarily in a normal American way of talking. They talk a little different.
If you use a colloquialism or a slang word or phrase, simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inviting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.
There's a way that white people and black people spoke in the '70s that is nothing like how they speak now. They spoke from a soul, actually. There's a singsongy way of walking and talking that's just different now.
You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
Write with the learned. Pronounce with the vulgar.
My songs have some street talk in them, but that's the way I talk and the way a lot of people I know talk.
Oh, this I have to see. I love it when you go for the vernacular. Jugular.
I hear it all the time in the street: 'It's the crisp bloke.'
It's interesting, even in popular culture, in our vernacular now, the whole idea of 'fake news.' You hear it repeated on scripted television shows, on reality shows, you just see it everywhere, even in other countries.
New words travel from one variety of English to another and at a rapidly increasing rate, thanks to the way language is exchanged today over e-mail, chat rooms, TV, etc.
That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.
