carlberg wrote:
After being corrected for writing a sentence that ended in a preposition, Churchill was quoted as saying something like, "That is something up with which I will not put."
I try to write with some precision, and usually do. But I've learned that even those who don't speak what is termed, "proper English," follow a mental set of their own grammatical rules. And somehow, if we listen intently enough, or if we read carefully enough, their meanings come through.
My kids are at least as good writers as I am. But my twins also are fluent in American Ebonics, the language of inner city Southern Blacks. They went to "minority majority" magnet schools and learned to speak as their peers spoke. They can walk into a room of those they went to school with and immediately shift gears. Their peers are equally adept at middle class "white speak".
Seeing that always reminds me of a summer job I had in a textile mill in a tiny rural South Carolina town. There were four of us college students, five technicians from Accrington and Oldham, England, a technician from Pakistan, and five mill "fixers" from Enoree, SC, the mill town.
We four students became translators. Everyone supposedly spoke English. But with six different accents and regional dialects among us, it was hard to understand, "Ah don' lak thot. 'An me thot spahnah," if you were a local mill fixer. The same meaning in their dialect was, "Thayut suh-ux. Gimme dat day-ur ree-unch. Of course, in "standard English," whatever the hell that is, they both meant, "Please hand me my four millimeter wrench!"
By the end of the summer, we all understood most of each others' meanings, when we could hear through our earplugs and over the roar of the several acres of machines. It was a revealing experience, an exercise in tolerance and sympathy, and a lesson in why communications is 100% the responsibility of BOTH receiver and sender!