GHT
I'll Lock Up
- Messages
- 9,779
- Location
- New Forest
That bad English is such a cruel take. It made me think, most people know of Cockney rhyming slang, but it's origin is prison rhyming slang, the prisoners didn't want to be understood except by fellow prisoners.That reminds me that I once got into a conversation with someone in Hawaii (we were attending a concert at the Bishop Museum). In response to something she said, I replied "Hawaiian Pidgin is actually a creole language" or something like that. To which she doubled-down by saying "It's not a language. It is bad English spoken by uneducated people." I was absolutely floored.
Taking that example, and this is only my conjecture, a slave arriving in a foreign land, afraid and knowing that brutality awaits everywhere. Why wouldn't they do what the prisoners did in Victorian England? Strikes me as a most sensible way of avoiding the slave master's whip.