Socially constructed grammar is what your parents or teachers were
targeting when they corrected your language use. If Susie loudly
announces “I gotta pee” during religious services, or if she says “I ain’t
got none,” when she is asked about pets, some adult nearby may correct
her, as you were possibly corrected (so long as the first language you
acquired was English). Everyone seems to have memories of this kind,
perhaps because such corrections can be quite harsh.
Linguists often keep notes on overheard conversations that illustrate
such points. For example, in 1989, in Borders Books in Ann Arbor, an
expensively dressed woman went rushing by, her son – maybe 10 years old
- running to keep up with her. Over her shoulder she said to him: “I hate it
when you use such ignorant, slovenly language. We don’t talk like that.”
I didn’t hear what the boy had said to get this kind of rebuke, but the
vitriol in the mother’s voice, the dismissive tone in the way she corrected
her son stuck with me. Suppose the boy had said, “Dad says the house
needs painted.”^10 This is a construction common in Michigan and some
other areas in the Midwest, but it usually strikes non-Michiganders as odd.
It still strikes me as odd, though I lived there for more than ten years. This
usage is strongly marked for both region and socioeconomic status
(Murray and Simon 1999).
If a boy growing up in Michigan used this construction, why would a
parent correct him so abruptly? It’s not that she didn’t understand the
message he was trying to get across; just the opposite. She was reacting to
the social markers her son was using. The rules violated were not
linguistic in nature; the objections rose out of socially constructed
concepts of proper English and good language. I do not identify with
Michiganders, the mother was saying, and neither do you. Stop talking like
them.
Social conventions are a tremendously powerful source in our lives.
Consider for a moment: A man wakes up one morning, ready to go to
work. He’ll be giving a speech he’s been preparing for weeks, to an
audience of a thousand employees. Everything hangs on this speech. His
life goals, his career. Everything. If he handles it right, he’ll be promoted