So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[scottyrocks]

"Irregardless" may have its origin in such a dialect -- a word used to express the same idea as "regardless" but with additional emphasis.

Maybe so, but . . .

 

[ChrisB]

Makes me wonder about “redouble,” a perfectly “proper” word but a seeming redundancy nonetheless.

Wouldn’t that be the same as quadruple?

 

[Zombie_61]

Wouldn’t that be the same as quadruple?

Let's all start using irrequadruple and see how long it takes Merriam-Webster to create a definition.

 

[3fingers]

Wouldn’t that be the same as quadruple?

It's all very confusing. Do you include the original single effort in the calculation? If so you have the original effort plus the second doubled effort, then possibly the 3rd redoubled effort. We may need a grant to study this.

 

[ChrisB]

Let's all start using irrequadruple and see how long it takes Merriam-Webster to create a definition.

I could care more, but I don’t.

 

[Fading Fast]

There are some American dialects where the use of a double or triple negative is actually a valid intensifier: "He don't wan't nothin' from nobody nohow!" A sentence like that might cause Sherwin Cody to writhe in dismay, but it clearly expresses the desired statement. "Irregardless" may have its origin in such a dialect -- a word used to express the same idea as "regardless" but with additional emphasis.

My dad and his some-did / some-didn't-graduate-high-school friends (college was a city on a shining hill far, far away) used double negatives and "ain't" regularly and the subjective and objective cases were all mangled - as well as having some other creative grammatical solutions. And when I started working, I saw that was common amongst a lot of kids of immigrants if the community they grew up in was tightly tied to its older generations.

It wasn't until I started school that I began to learn that there was something called "proper grammar" or "proper English." And to this day - and despite having a career that includes professional writing - I will still slip into my dad's grammar world from time to time (even in my writing - which, if I have time to edit and if it wasn't intentionally done for emphasis, I usually catch).

Without thinking about it, I assumed the school-taught superiority of "proper" over "street" grammar was real and made sense. But over time, I learned that language has always been evolving, so change is just part of the process and I don't see one as simply "right" and the other as simply "wrong." It's chaotic and, sometimes, the results seem counter intuitive and/or not productive, but what is the alternative - the grammar police?

And there this classic English writing lesson: "learn the rules first and, then, you'll know when it is okay to break them for stylistic fillip for your writing." I agree wholeheartedly with that advice, but also see that it folds back in on itself by touching on your (Lizzie's) example. If a professional writer can use double negatives or sentence fragments for sentences as a way of emphasizing a point or accomplishing some other communication goal, then why is that better than a community whose norm is to do so? Sure, the English teacher's answer might be - "you can break the rules once you know them -" but is that really an answer?

Some part of me still thinks there is something called "proper English" that we should use - and, I guess, it should be taught in school under the idea of creating a common language - but the rest of me just sees it as a big opportunity set with some choosing a very formal and rules-based grammar, others hewing to their community norms or individual proclivities and the rest of us falling somewhere in-between.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Students of African-American Vernacular English know all about the practice of "code switching," and I submit that we all "code switch" to one extent or another in our daily interactions -- a formal variation of the language we speak for more formal situations, and a more colloquial dialect when we're in a more relaxed setting. I have my "radio voice" and my normal voice, which are completely different, and I consciously switch between the two depending on what's required.

Culturally, one classification of dialect may be considered superior to another in terms of prestige, but from a linguistic perspective, they're simply variations on a theme. Street forms of English, if they have their own internally-consistent structure and rules of usage, are considered just as valid linguistically as Standard English. But, culturally, SE is the prestigious dialect, and it pays to know how to speak it, even if you don't care to use it all the time. I'll speak SE when I'm on TV or whatever, but when I'm at my regular job I speak a colloquial, non-rhotic New England/Northeastern working-class dialect -- because that's the character I'm playing when interacting with the customers. They expect a Local to talk that way, and I'm in show business, so I give them a show, exaggerating my natural speech patterns just enough so they get what they want.

All language, you could argue, is performance, and when we interact with other people over the course of a day, we're all performing our cultural role. The way we choose to speak in any given situation is one way to do that.

 

[tonyb]

Students of African-American Vernacular English know all about the practice of "code switching," and I submit that we all "code switch" to one extent or another in our daily interactions -- a formal variation of the language we speak for more formal situations, and a more colloquial dialect when we're in a more relaxed setting. I have my "radio voice" and my normal voice, which are completely different, and I consciously switch between the two depending on what's required.

Culturally, one classification of dialect may be considered superior to another in terms of prestige, but from a linguistic perspective, they're simply variations on a theme. Street forms of English, if they have their own internally-consistent structure and rules of usage, are considered just as valid linguistically as Standard English. But, culturally, SE is the prestigious dialect, and it pays to know how to speak it, even if you don't care to use it all the time. I'll speak SE when I'm on TV or whatever, but when I'm at my regular job I speak a colloquial, non-rhotic New England/Northeastern working-class dialect -- because that's the character I'm playing when interacting with the customers. They expect a Local to talk that way, and I'm in show business, so I give them a show, exaggerating my natural speech patterns just enough so they get what they want.

All language, you could argue, is performance, and when we interact with other people over the course of a day, we're all performing our cultural role. The way we choose to speak in any given situation is one way to do that.

Whatever a person’s idiolect, whatever “voice” he or she employs in various settings, it had better sound natural — provided that person wishes to be heard.

Among the best advice to aspiring writers I’ve ever read is that all the characters in the writer’s story, whether fiction or nonfiction, have to be fundamentally “real,” and most especially the narrator. Readers will move on to something else if the writer comes across as affected or self-satisfied.

Employing different voices depending on the setting is in most cases unconscious and perfectly natural. It’s part of getting along, part of fitting in. I avoid hifalutin jargon in general and in particular among my predominantly working-class friends and associates. Using five-dollar words where the five-cent ones would serve just as well (or better, often) shows the speaker to be a gasbag.

But I gotta admit that I sometimes play the rube when in sniffier company. Tweaking those upturned noses gives me a kick.

 

[scottyrocks]

Students of African-American Vernacular English know all about the practice of "code switching," and I submit that we all "code switch" to one extent or another in our daily interactions -- a formal variation of the language we speak for more formal situations, and a more colloquial dialect when we're in a more relaxed setting. I have my "radio voice" and my normal voice, which are completely different, and I consciously switch between the two depending on what's required.

Culturally, one classification of dialect may be considered superior to another in terms of prestige, but from a linguistic perspective, they're simply variations on a theme. Street forms of English, if they have their own internally-consistent structure and rules of usage, are considered just as valid linguistically as Standard English. But, culturally, SE is the prestigious dialect, and it pays to know how to speak it, even if you don't care to use it all the time. I'll speak SE when I'm on TV or whatever, but when I'm at my regular job I speak a colloquial, non-rhotic New England/Northeastern working-class dialect -- because that's the character I'm playing when interacting with the customers. They expect a Local to talk that way, and I'm in show business, so I give them a show, exaggerating my natural speech patterns just enough so they get what they want.

All language, you could argue, is performance, and when we interact with other people over the course of a day, we're all performing our cultural role. The way we choose to speak in any given situation is one way to do that.

So is this^ your normal voice or your radio voice?

 

[3fingers]

But I gotta admit that I sometimes play the rube when in sniffier company. Tweaking those upturned noses gives me a kick.

Likewise I do occasionally enjoy leading the self important down the garden path and then quietly letting the air out of their balloon. I have noticed that most of the people who have anointed themselves as highly superior are by far the easiest to lead.

 

[LizzieMaine]

There's a word for what sometimes happens when people try to put on the dog vocally -- "hypercorrection," the use of a form that's intended to sound more prestigious than the actual word called for in the situation, but which isn't actually a valid form. Some believe a word like "irregardless" is merely a hypercorrected form of "regardless" that caught on.

You can also hypercorrect pronunciation. My mother does this whenever she's interacting with someone in a service setting by, most noticeably, overpronouncing her "r's" and the "g" at the end of "-ing" words. Her natural pronunciation flattens all her "r's" and drops the "g's" and when she hypercorrects them it only calls attention to them as not part of her natural speech.

Hypercorrection can be used intentionally or humorously as a way of emphasizing words, but it's a bad habit to get into in daily speech.

 

[LizzieMaine]

So is this^ your normal voice or your radio voice?

Pretty much my radio voice -- when I'm writing for publication or for a public forum like this I stick to SE just for clarity's sake. But if I'm writing to a friend, I'll be much more colloquial. And if we're talking in person, I go to my normal voice. Ain' 'at da way ev'ybuddy duzzit?

 

[Zombie_61]

Students of African-American Vernacular English know all about the practice of "code switching," and I submit that we all "code switch" to one extent or another in our daily interactions -- a formal variation of the language we speak for more formal situations, and a more colloquial dialect when we're in a more relaxed setting. I have my "radio voice" and my normal voice, which are completely different, and I consciously switch between the two depending on what's required...

A female friend does this when answering phone calls at work; she pronounces her words a little more clearly than she does during fact-to-face interactions, and her voice drops a few octaves and becomes a little "Marilyn Monroe" breathy. A male friend and I refer to it as her "phone sex" voice.

I've done the same thing when speaking with customers on the phone. I don't think it was a huge difference, but I wanted to make sure they could understand what I was saying. In person I tend to slur my words a bit and occasionally stammer like Bob Newhart, so I tried to not let that happen when representing whichever company I was working for at the time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

On the phone I'll often deliberately overpronounce numbers, such as when reading back a credit card, in the manner of a telephone operator. That "Ernestine"-type of pronunciation -- "Zee-row nye-un fye-uv tha-ree" -- was, although not quite so exaggerated as Ms. Tomlin did it, a standard requirement with Bell System operators in the manual-exchange era, and my mother would still do it long after she left Ma B's employ, passing the habit along to me.

As for hypercorrection, the ultra-common example that always annoys me is when someone says something like "A bunch of us were there -- Joe, Sally, and myself." There's no grammatical need for "myself" in that phrase, "I" works perfectly fine, but to many people it "sounds" incorrect, and they'll stick "myself" in there in its place so as to sound more correct. "Myself" is even more commonly used as a hypercorrection when "Me" is the correct pronoun -- "The job fell to Bob and me" becomes "The job fell to Bob and myself." But in either case, there's no reason for it other than the unwarranted fear of being seen as "incorrect."

 

[Lean'n'mean]

It's all Greek to me !

 

[HudsonHawk]

Students of African-American Vernacular English know all about the practice of "code switching," and I submit that we all "code switch" to one extent or another in our daily interactions -- a formal variation of the language we speak for more formal situations, and a more colloquial dialect when we're in a more relaxed setting. I have my "radio voice" and my normal voice, which are completely different, and I consciously switch between the two depending on what's required.

Culturally, one classification of dialect may be considered superior to another in terms of prestige, but from a linguistic perspective, they're simply variations on a theme. Street forms of English, if they have their own internally-consistent structure and rules of usage, are considered just as valid linguistically as Standard English. But, culturally, SE is the prestigious dialect, and it pays to know how to speak it, even if you don't care to use it all the time. I'll speak SE when I'm on TV or whatever, but when I'm at my regular job I speak a colloquial, non-rhotic New England/Northeastern working-class dialect -- because that's the character I'm playing when interacting with the customers. They expect a Local to talk that way, and I'm in show business, so I give them a show, exaggerating my natural speech patterns just enough so they get what they want.

All language, you could argue, is performance, and when we interact with other people over the course of a day, we're all performing our cultural role. The way we choose to speak in any given situation is one way to do that.

I do this all the time with my Southern accent. Normally, people say they can hear it, but it's just there in the background, so to speak. There's the ubiquitous "y'all", I'll occasionally use phrases like "fixin to", and I sometimes have a pronounced drawl (which is elongating words, making a single syllable word into two syllables), but for the most part, I speak fairly "normal", especially in a work setting. But when I get around my family or others whose accent is much more pronounced, I suddenly turn into Jed Clampett. I'll sometimes pull out a phrase or colloquialism that my wife has never heard, and she'll laugh hysterically

 

[Bamaboots]

^^And I thought it was just me. "fixin to" has been difficult to explain at times.

 

[tonyb]

My stepfather could be quite the charming scalawag. His gravelly Southern accent and down-home colloquialisms were a large part of that charm.

Must’ve been some carpetbagger in his ancestry, though. He could be kinda hard to find when the bills came due.

 

[Formeruser012523]

Terms like ya'll, fixin to, and ain't are part of my every day vocabulary. I "code switch" for no one. My own sister laughed when i told her something was "in yonder" one day. We live in the same state, how has she never heard that before?

 

[Trenchfriend]

Gosh, kids. Why so impatient to step in the railcar? Please, let all the people, including 30+ grampas, get out before you get in, next time.

"A heart for seniors!"

PS:
No real problem. The kids weren't aggressive. There were maaany of our Realschule and Gymnasium-kids on the platform and I just wondered, why they stood so near to the edge and too many on one point, because normally, they are more spreaded on the platform.