Do you, Speaker, marry Ken?
I have a bone to pick/axe to grind/complaint to make, and I guess only the 1.75 people who read this blog will know about it. Last night on PBS was a documentary, "Do You Speak American" which I had heard/read hear and there was good, but didn't think much of it until I realized, flipping through the channels, that it would be on, and so I watched (it's three one-hour segments long). All throughout I was like, "this is awesome", awaiting the point when they would get to California talk. So, eventually they do, hitting the much awaited (by me) "Chicano Dialect" of English (see video clip in question here).
So.. They get to this point, and they have these two young dudes speaking in a way that is very familiar to me. So anyway, here they have a professor, Carmen Fought (from Pitzer, no less, which sucks as Pitzer is a school near and dear to my heart), seemingly doing a good job describing the Chicano dialect. Then, while the dudes are talking, on the screen flashes the word "hotness" -- THREE TIMES no less -- and shortly thereafter Fought, with the cheery smugness only a very genuinely delighted and happy intellectual has, notes (something to the effect of) "when they say hotness - they're talking about cute girls".
I didn't think that was right, and I even rewound the tape (yes, I'm a nerd -- I taped it -- learned that trick of taping PBS from my father) and re-confirmed what I suspected/knew.. I don't think they used the word "hotness" ONCE. The first time they used the word "heinas" which is like a fine dip (another colloquialism, I know, but whatever - a fine girl).. and then, another time they said "fine ass" as in "a fine ass honey" or whatever.. Maybe using the word "hotness" is a new thing among kids, but it sounds out of place -- I'm convinced they were talking about "heinas" and "fine ass girls".
How Fought misinterpreted this I don't know -- maybe her audio was bad.. But come on, man! You're making Pitzer look really bad.. She totally discredited herself.. How wack..
Also, what they fail to mentioned in the documentary is that the various dialects affect one another. The (rich, assumedly, if that's a word) kids from Irvine said "tight" to mean good, and they actually were insightful enough to note that their lingo comes from hip-hop. But I started saying "tight" maybe 8 or 9 years ago. But I also say "foo" (fool), and have probably been saying that since, I don't know -- junior high. This all goes to say that the documentary seems, in hindsight, pretty sloppy. Maybe the idea was to give a broad sense, but it really oversimplified how entrenched some of these ways of speaking in California are by focusing almost exclusively on (there was a twenty-something surfer) people under 18.
So.. I guess I still recommend watching it -- it's interesting.. but also really, maybe too imprecise and hand-wavy. Or maybe I'm just (finally?) starting to see the difference between journalism and scholarship.
On a totally unrelated note: Joe Henderson's version of "On Green Dolphin Street" from the album FOUR is off the freaking chain.
So.. They get to this point, and they have these two young dudes speaking in a way that is very familiar to me. So anyway, here they have a professor, Carmen Fought (from Pitzer, no less, which sucks as Pitzer is a school near and dear to my heart), seemingly doing a good job describing the Chicano dialect. Then, while the dudes are talking, on the screen flashes the word "hotness" -- THREE TIMES no less -- and shortly thereafter Fought, with the cheery smugness only a very genuinely delighted and happy intellectual has, notes (something to the effect of) "when they say hotness - they're talking about cute girls".
I didn't think that was right, and I even rewound the tape (yes, I'm a nerd -- I taped it -- learned that trick of taping PBS from my father) and re-confirmed what I suspected/knew.. I don't think they used the word "hotness" ONCE. The first time they used the word "heinas" which is like a fine dip (another colloquialism, I know, but whatever - a fine girl).. and then, another time they said "fine ass" as in "a fine ass honey" or whatever.. Maybe using the word "hotness" is a new thing among kids, but it sounds out of place -- I'm convinced they were talking about "heinas" and "fine ass girls".
How Fought misinterpreted this I don't know -- maybe her audio was bad.. But come on, man! You're making Pitzer look really bad.. She totally discredited herself.. How wack..
Also, what they fail to mentioned in the documentary is that the various dialects affect one another. The (rich, assumedly, if that's a word) kids from Irvine said "tight" to mean good, and they actually were insightful enough to note that their lingo comes from hip-hop. But I started saying "tight" maybe 8 or 9 years ago. But I also say "foo" (fool), and have probably been saying that since, I don't know -- junior high. This all goes to say that the documentary seems, in hindsight, pretty sloppy. Maybe the idea was to give a broad sense, but it really oversimplified how entrenched some of these ways of speaking in California are by focusing almost exclusively on (there was a twenty-something surfer) people under 18.
So.. I guess I still recommend watching it -- it's interesting.. but also really, maybe too imprecise and hand-wavy. Or maybe I'm just (finally?) starting to see the difference between journalism and scholarship.
On a totally unrelated note: Joe Henderson's version of "On Green Dolphin Street" from the album FOUR is off the freaking chain.
posted by A at 10:25 a.m.
1 Comments:
I also noticed the heavy drama - getting a white guy who lives on the other side of the border and wife & kids are MEXICAN, talking about - "it's real - they're invading"..
But in the third half, about California & the West, they got a similarly cartoonish woman (An L.A. V.J.) to talk about Spanglish.. So, watching all three episodes back to back it seemed they were simply trying to present the "is Spanish taking over?!??" side very dramatically in classic cliff-hanger fashion so that they could "answer" with "no, it's not" at the beginning of the next episode.. What's weird is that the piece ends up suggesting that "computers and technology", not Spanish, are the real threats to English..
Also.. they made the annoying mistake lots of clearly gringo-produced media makes by using Salsa-esque music to represent all Latinos..
Grassroots Latinos in L.A. tend to dislike Salsa (most of them are Mexican)- it's more popular with college-educated Latinos who are sympathetic on some level with pan-Latino ideology.. And yet CYSA used it to introduce the section on California "Spanglish" and "Chicano English".. It's almost like playing Can-Can music to introduce a section on Southern Italy -- "It's all European, right??" (ok.. maybe not - I'm exaggerating, but still, you get the point)
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