Is it just me or does anybody else think that when people consciously adopt this style of speaking, all they do is flag up their ignorance?
They just sound thick to me...I ain't the best spoken person and my diction is questionable to say the least but the way I speak is reflective of where I was born in London and my family unit.
It is an emergent property of the formative years of my childhood but the same cannot be said for a lot of today's young where they deliberately change the way they speak at an age when the way they speak has long been ingrained. and they do this because.....?
To appear hard?
To mirror their peer group?
Hmmmm...it beats me ...
If I may expand on Pete's words...
The way people speak is one thing, the way people write is another.
My Dutch has a strong Amsterdam accent, which many people would find crude. Yet when I put pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, I pride myself in my abilities in grammar and spelling. Sure, I make a mistake once in a while (I remember I once made a mistake... Must have been in '84), but overall what I write is "The Queen's Dutch".
The languages we speak and the languages we write are two different beasts...
What I have found though, is that the people that try their hardest to write as ghetto (Or Urban, which seems to be the word of the day) as they can, are usually the least ghetto of all. Middle class white kids from some medium sized town, where everybody knows the single token homeless guy. It baffles me everytime that those that yell "Thug life" the most have never seen a thug in real life. Only somebody that's not from the streets would think it's something to glorify. The real reason so many people that live "on the streets" are willing to do bad things is because they would give anything to get away from that life. So why so many kids try to copy that life.... I don't know.
Yes kids, listening to HipHop turns you into a f*cking idiot. So whatever you do, don't click the MySpace link in my sig. Protect yourself...
