Bill Cosby, the man who once telephoned Eddie Murphy to chastise him for using naughty words on stage, has recently been at it again—this time the rebuke is aimed at black people in general.
As the most senior of black comedians still able to string a sentence together, Bill can hardly be expected to keep up with the young, astute comedians of today. Comedy has come a long way since Bill was at his peak; the ability to use the ‘F’ word as a noun, verb, adjective—indeed, every word in the sentence—is a relatively recent breakthrough.
To attain such a high level of skill with swear words requires practice from an early age, perhaps due to some region of the brain that atrophies if you don’t use it.
However, due to his celebrated TV career, and books on fatherhood, Bill is a fairly plausible father figure in America. He’s the family man, and his respected position has ensured that his latest sermon about constancy and prudissitude did not fall on deaf ears:
“Let me tell you something, your dirty laundry gets out of school at 2:30 every day, it’s cursing and calling each other n—— as they’re walking up and down the street.”
This is an interesting one. I’m sure Bill is fully aware of the versatility of the ‘N’ word when used amongst black people. Depending on the context, it can either be used as a term of endearment, or to describe someone as ignorant. In general, though, I would think that a group reclaiming a word previously used to persecute them can only be an empowering thing.
Indeed, it has been reclaimed with a vengeance, as anyone who isn’t black using the word is likely to get the bejesus beaten out of them. cf. ‘fag’ and ‘dyke’ amongst homosexuals, ‘wog’ amongst Europeans, and so on.
“I can’t even talk the way these people talk, ‘why you ain’t', ‘where you is’—and I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk. Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth.”
The Queen’s English it is not. But our language is a living language, imparted by British imperialism and American salesmanship to all four corners of the globe, and we can only count ourselves lucky that most dialects of English are still mutually intelligible. Just the other day, a Nigerian dignitary emailed me seeking my help to transfer a large sum of money, and I was able to understand every word. What an age we live in!
The dialect Bill talks about here has diverged from standard English, due to this chaos which guarantees that the best efforts to standardise a living language are futile. It exists, and is spoken by a huge number of people. Therefore, it deserves more analysis than simply cleaving it in twain with a copy of The Elements of Style.
Linguistic experts call it African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), and study has shown that although it appears to be a hopeless mess of poorly conjugated verbs and double negatives when compared to standard English, it does in fact have a sound grammar in its own right.
Furthermore, most speakers of AAVE are fully able to do a context switch and converse with Whitey in his own language with no problems.
Bill then went on to criticise men who beat their women, and those in prison who blame their incarceration on their skin colour instead of their having broken the law. It’s a true message and there are few more entitled to deliver it, and there is no doubt that he had to deliver it forcefully in order to make an impact. I just think the man would be able to have more of an impact if he tried to empathise with young people instead of just criticising them.
