Alice in Blunderland

From the very start, people in her school noticed that Alice was far different from normal students. Each day, she tried to learn a new rule of grammar or spelling. She learned early on that "No! No!" was not an example of multiple negatives. She was too polite to correct Billy, who had the desk next to her, when he said in some casual conversation "I ain't not gonna do that, no way!" She didn't want to criticize and say that "ain't" should be "am not" but too man y people now seem to accept that "ain't". What Alice sadly learned is that language and the spoken word no longer distinguishes the learned from the uneducated. Perhaps the reason for that can be blamed on chat rooms on the Internet, with "you are" becomes "ur" and, even worse, "they are" or "their" becomes "there." It seems unfair to criticize so-called short cuts, but it does carry over into everyday conversational language. People don't write as well as they used to, mainly because everything is computerized and there is such a thing as "spellcheck" which automatically corrects misspelled words or phrases.

Two African-American girls sit in front of Alice in her classroom. To hear them talk one might think they were in a totally different English class. They speak in what is now considered "cool" mostly among African Americans. It is a twist of accepted grammar called "Ebonics." The girls use "be" all too often instead of "are". For example, Alice hears them talking about "We be going to the cafeteria where we be slurpin' down some I=cees." It's a whole declension thing, which now seems to be acceptable by some. But not everybody. Alice, for one, basically a purist, sees this as improper English. But then, Taisha and LaWanda feel that they ar entitled to their own "native" language to sort of prove that they are different from "proper" English.