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John Mcwhorter Quotes


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Quotes by John Mcwhorter

Showing 1-10 of 20 Quotes by John Mcwhorter

Texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk?

~John Mcwhorter

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'LOL' is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don't have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would.

~John Mcwhorter

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Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying 'victim,' especially when you're not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you're not one.

~John Mcwhorter

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Black English is simpler than standard English in some ways; for example, it often gets by with just 'be' and drops 'am,' 'is,' and 'are.' That's because black English arose when adult African slaves learned the language.

~John Mcwhorter

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Loving your language means a command of its vocabulary beyond the level of the everyday.

~John Mcwhorter

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Rap and spoken word have reawakened the country to poetry in itself. Texting and Twitter encourage creative uses of casual language, in ways I have celebrated widely. But we've fallen behind on savoring the formal layer of our language.

~John Mcwhorter

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It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.

~John Mcwhorter

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As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

~John Mcwhorter

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Racism is not dead. Definitely, there are these biases.

~John Mcwhorter

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As far as I'm concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I'm not interested in white people loving me. It's an unrealistic expectation. Black people don't love anybody but themselves.

~John Mcwhorter

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: Unknown

Links

Find John Mcwhorter on Amazon

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