I agree with you that we need to be more open
minded about language. What I wish is that Pig Latin
would be accepted. It fits right in there with Ebonics.What assumptions are the letter writers working with? Why
might they have come to such conclusions? What are the
primary emotions that come across?Notes
1 Moral panics have been documented as far back as antiquity. More
recent examples include the Salem Witch Trials, the McCarthy
hearings, Satanic Ritual Abuse in the 1980s and the Terry Schiavo
case, in which family members disagreed on whether or not to
discontinue life support for a woman in a vegetative coma.
2 In Verbal Hygiene Cameron looks closely at moral panics in England,
from dog attacks to The Great Grammar Controversy.
3 Frankfurter’s Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and
Satanic Abuse in History (2006) takes as a thesis that Satanic ritual
abuse stories surface again and again over time because they serve an
important function. In a community where individuals, groups or
institutions are leaning toward dissent, a moral panic provides an
excuse to persecute or root out the non-compliant.
4 All numbers in this section originate from the U.S. Census Bureau,
2006–2008 American Community Survey, unless otherwise noted. Data
are based on a sample and are subject to sampling variability. Race
figures do not include those who self-identify as “more than one race.”
5 Not included here are those who self-identified as “more than one
race.” Note that the Latino population is distributed among the races
also according to self-identification.
6 Linguists and educators have produced a tremendous amount of work
on the theory and methodology, a great deal of which originates in
Europe, where multilingualism and bidialectalism are the rule rather
than the exception.