Unintelligible Dialects - A Harangue About Slang

The worst part is that isn't even colorful. m/r

A Harangue About Slang - Taki's Magazine
by John Derbyshire October 24, 2013

Following up last week’s rant about cant, kindly permit me a harangue about slang and the affliction of bad diction. Got that? Last week, the empty, insincere things we say; this week, the sloppy, lazy way we say them.

My inspiration here is a news story from the ever-reliable Mail Online, October 10th: “Why are so many middle-class children speaking in Jamaican patois?” London Journalist Nick Harding is listening to his 11-year-old daughter on the phone with a coeval (which, no, does not mean “a person you’re evil together with”):

I listened in, as I made jam in the kitchen. ‘Lol, that’s well sick!’ Millie said. ‘DW, yolo!’

This indecipherable code-speak (‘sick’ means awesome, ‘DW’ is don’t worry and ‘yolo’ means you only live once) was delivered in an accent I could only place as somewhere between South London, downtown Los Angeles and Kingston, Jamaica.

It certainly isn’t indigenous to our home village of Ashtead, in the rolling Surrey hills.

Surrey is Stockbroker Belt. We’re talking upper-middle-class folk here—the kind who make their own jam. Apparently the offspring of well-heeled Brits nowadays, among themselves, talk like Ali G in a dialect known officially as Multicultural Youth English (MYE).

GO TO: http://takimag.com/article/a_harangue_about_slang_john_derbyshire1/print#ixzz2iykIUosy