Besides school shootings and Paris Hilton, America is known for two things: 1) Western movies 2) Romantic comedies Both westerns and rom-coms are beautiful things. Westerns, especially, have “America” stamped all over them. As Cormac McCarthy has pointed out, wherever you go on this planet, people have heard about and been fascinated by the lore … Continue reading
En la costa este, le gente tienen algo que yo no tengo: un sentido de cultura, y tambien un sentido de identidad, un sentido de tradición histórica. La gente aquí saben su patrimonio. En mi clase hay una mujer que puede ingresar en The Daughters of the Revolution. Sin embargo, yo nací en Southern California, … Continue reading
As I’ve been saying, the standard’s form is an accident of history. Whichever group had the money, power, and education was always going to be the group that wrote. From the spoken dialect of the wealthy, educated group came the written standard because only the wealthy (and, I should add, the educated priests) had the … Continue reading
Here is an oddity: the field of composition was founded on the value of standard written English, and yet, in certain corners of the field, the least sexy thing you can do is to talk about the value of standard written English. You can praise the vernacular (which I certainly do); you can defend the … Continue reading
