English as a foreign language

[tielan]

A very interesting and eye-opening re-perspective on what I think of as "proper English".

David Foster Wallace and the foreign tongue of Standard Written English

Comments

[thothmes]

I grew up a professor's kid and Standard Written English was my native tongue. I've also been a teaching assistant, where many of the students spoke in vernaculars, either Black or Urban. But I didn't learn about the difference between Spoken Vernacular and Standard Written English from being a T.A., although they did have a special class for us all to learn that. Instead I learned it from living in Greece and Palestine, where there is a much larger gulf between the spoken and the written, and I learned to think of the difference at the age of seven.

My mother always corrected us when our speech differed from Standard Written English. She was grooming us for success later in life, but sometimes we caught her out, doing those same forbidden things. Her response was always the same: "I was speaking colloquially." or sometimes, "I was speaking in the vernacular."

Edited for spelling. I know how to spell "speech", but apparently my fingers think it contains "ea". How very odd.