Is it considered racism if you don't like the way people talk regardless of their skin color? Just Axing.

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Interestingly, the word ask has been pronounced like ax in some dialects of English at least as far back as Shakespeare. It's never been exclusively or even primarily a "black thing."

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Okay, I'm going to need some supporting evidence of this . I mean, to be axed or not to be axed, that is the question.

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Turns out I remembered wrongly. People have been pronouncing ask like ax not just since the time of Shakespeare, but for over a millennium . In a related phenomenon, apparently the word task is in fact a variant of tax !

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A week or so ago I mentioned that I listen to a history of England podcast. A few days ago he was saying that Shakespearian English is closing in sound to American English than it is to modern British English.

That said when I hear someone talking about Black people saying "ax" I think of the story my wife told me. She was attended Chicago Public School. The teacher was a Black woman who grew tired of correcting her students. By the end of the year when they would tell her that they wanted to "ax her sumting", she would in mock horror tell them not to ax her. I doubt her effort made a difference.

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Oh, absolutely. It's gotten to the point that I cringe violently whenever I hear actors, in a misguided attempt to sound "more authentic," perform Shakespeare with the modern Received Pronunciation -- because they're actually being far less true to the original material that they would if they simply spoke with their everyday accents! It's especially agonizing when those those actors suck at mimicking English accents, as most Americans do. A lot of Shakespearean puns, for example, simply make no sense in Received Pronunciation, but they become instantly apparent -- and downright hilarious -- when performed in what's come to be known as Original Pronunciation or OP, which resembles Long John Silver far more closely than it does Benedict Cumberbatch:





















Incidentally, Elizabethans also spoke much higher and much faster than we do today. The average Shakespearean play was written to run about two hours; hence the line "The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love, /. . . is now the two hours' traffic of our stage" from the prologue of Romeo and Juliet. It makes me so angry when modern theater troupes cut entire scenes from Shakespeare in an attempt to keep productions under three hours. It's unfortunate that we speak so slo-o-o-o-o-wly these days (and our attention spans are so atrophied, but that's a topic for another conversation) that we feel compelled to treat the classics with such careless brutality.

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In this video, actor Ben Crystal gives a full explanation of a deviously hilarious joke from As You Like that only becomes apparent in Original Pronunciation. Fast forward to 48:08 . If you have the time, the whole video is well worth watching.





Incidentally, his description of how OP changes his manner of speaking resonates with me. The exact same thing happens to me when I speak German. I instantly shift to a lower register in my voice. I don't think about it or even do it consciously. It just happens. It's purely instinctive.

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I can help you here.

First, some might say the way you pose the question is designed to demean; given that there were many other ways to pose the question more tactfully. But, tact, like speech pattern is not something passed thru genetics, it's something acquired by interacting with good character within your environment.

Second, when we were babies we learned to interact with our environment by mimicking our surroundings; especially with regard to speech. A child that heard nothing but Spanish spoken will not be able to speak English. If all you heard was "ax;" you'd be saying "ax" as well. As far as WPR's little Chicago Public School story demonstrating Blacks having difficulty learning correct English, it is much less sinister than that. Some young Black children hear "ax" all their life, so they say "ax." One teacher for a one hour period tries to get them to say "ask" instead. But, the other 23 hours and weekends and summer breaks their friends, family and acquaintances say "ax" 90% of the time. Saying 'ax" is nothing more than a habit pulled from the environment in which they live.

Third, are you a racist because it bothers you?
You need to ask yourself more questions:
Does it bother you when a southerner says "y'all;" or when Tony Saprano says "whadda use guys mean"; or the strange pronunciations [unless you're from there] of people from Boston or Chicago; etc?
Do you like the way your kids or friends text you sodomizing the language and proper grammatical construction?

If every white person that doesn't speak English the way you like bothers you equally as much as when a Black person does it; then I'd say you don't have a problem.

This not about you, its assumed every white person not using perfect King James English bugs the hell out of you just as much, but, these days, this is how the average bigot manages himself in our society. Even on the streets of GB, a person using the n-word or expressions of similar import, will find their economic and social prospects limited. So, learning from their environment, the average bigot adjusts. They express their bigotry by reviling a negative characteristic associated with the racial group. Like taking issue with the proclivity of Blacks to say "ax;" or rail on Black on Black crime; or disparage Obama policies; or point out disparities in education or socioeconomic status; supporting Muslim ban, or a border wall, etc.

This is what makes it tough. In the good ol' days, you know, when America was Great, you knew the bigots, they would just use offensive racial names. But today, someone, for example, could have a great reason to disparage an Obama policy or site a true per capita crime stat and bigotry has absolutely nothing to do with it. You must look at a decent body of a person's work to know if they're a bigot. And making it even tougher is some bigots will convince themselves they are not.

One of the most reasonable posts I've ever seen you write, Barfarn. Kudos. I guess I'd just ask, why do you need to sniff out the bigots? As long as someone is socially functional, why do his internal motivations matter? If two people happen to oppose a policy advocated by Obama, for example, there's no reason why they can't work together on that issue, even if one is driven by high philosophical ideals and the other by racial prejudice -- or, to take the element of race out of it altogether, by class envy or even jingoism.

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I have had black people talk “like white people” when they are around white people, and revert to “Ebonics” when around other blacks.

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