Remediated Genres (2)

I was teaching as an adjunct at a southeast Ohio community college when an email came around from the department heads, explaining that the English faculty was to work on "eradicating" our students' dialect. We would start with one "outlawed" dialectical feature per week--we would announce the banned words to our classes, then punish any student who used them in speech or writing. (The method of punishment was left up to us.) The first phrase on the chopping block: We was.

I'll tell you what we was. We was screwed.

I've often thought that I should write down a sort of Appalachian dictionary. Not just for local words--did anyone carry their books to class in a poke today? The answer may surprise you--but also for phrases, constructions, and their deeply rooted origins. Maybe if I managed to make sound academic enough, our teachers would stop treating us like idiots for speaking it. Maybe we'd stop believing it of ourselves.

Pap always said we lived on Hisgee Road. When I was little, he nicknamed me Matildee. He took me fishing in a crick. It wasn't until I was older that I realized we lived on Hisgah Road, that he should have been calling me Matlida, and that all this time we'd been fishing in a creek.

My nephew is 10. I asked him recently if he wanted to walk down to the crick. "It's a creek," he told me in the way that children sometimes do when they feel like they've just one-upped an adult. "Well, it's spelled that way," I replied. "But you can pronounce it the other way, too. It's the Scotch-Irish pronunciation. That's what part of our family was. And that's how a lot of people around here talk sometime. It's not wrong, it's just different." He waited for me to finish speaking before he delivered the coup de grace. "My teacher said it's wrong."

I've worried about that a lot--I'm a language-person, so I would worry about that.  How will Dale feel if he grows up believing the way he was taught to speak is wrong?