Trash talking

The excellent Mrs. Miller poses this question on Notes today:

I have a serious answer to the question of why this happens, and why it’s so irritating to Gen X. It’s about social class, and about the modern idolatry of the low-class segment of black culture by white kids.

The strange use of words that started with Millennials and continues in Gen Z is noteworthy. This is not an example of “natural language change in every way like all other language change in history.” It’s a cliff drop between Gen X and the younger, not the gradual transition we saw in prior eras.

Here’s what I think happened. It’s connected to race and class. Sometime around 2000, America decided that Only Black Rap and R and B Could Be Good Music. Suddenly, rap—and not just good stuff, but the majority that’s just bad—replaced huge swathes of what used to be pop music.

At the same time, and more as time went on, young white kids started speaking in ways that only lower-class, inner-city, grammatically challenged black people spoke. Wait, and stop. I did not say “as black people spoke.” I said, “as lower-class, inner-city, grammatically challenged” black people spoke. Difference. Don’t pull the “ray-ciss” card.

The most popular sitcom in America in the late 80s was The Cosby Show. It depicted an American upper-middle-class family with solid values, good grooming, a work ethic, and love. Everyone watched it. Everyone. No one thought of it as a “black” show. If you dared to suggest to Claire Huxtable (the mother) that she was teaching her kids to “speak like white kids,” she would have slapped your face, and then she would have instructed you that there is no such thing as “speaking white” and “speaking black.” Instead, there was being an educated and literate American, or being an uneducated and illiterate one.

Neither blacks nor whites in my youth admired or called “authentic” the street slang and shit-talking that is now taken as “authentically black.” They would have, correctly, found that view offensive. Now it’s standard.

This became the standard patois for white kids, middle class kids, and university kids. They started inserting glottal stops in words that, prior to this, only low-status blacks and a few “trailer park” whites put glottal stops in.

Example: The word “button” became “buh’IN”. The word “student” became “stoo’ENT.”

Other examples include ugly constructions like, “Based OFF OF a true story,” and the like. At the same time, the subjunctive, never something most Americans were great at (though better than Brits) all but disappeared. What is the subjunctive mood? It’s a conditional phrase. I’ll illustrate:

WRONG BUT COMMON: “I’d go to the store if I wasn’t so tired.”

CORRECT BUT UNCOMMON TODAY: “I’d go to the store if I weren’t so tired.”

You can probably think of many other examples.

Now, why does my generation, X, find this so irritating? Again, it’s not simply and only because “you’re like, lol, old, and like, lol old people always hate young lingo.” There’s some of that, but it’s not just that. Remember what I said above: there has been a cliff drop in language change, not a gradual transition that we saw in prior generations. What my generation experiences is a very sharp, very noticeable, artificial-feeling enforced language change.

But the real reason is the one people are not going to like: it irritates us because this contemporary patois is exactly what only lower-class kids, black and white, sounded like when we were growing up. Only kids from poor, uneducated (and proud of it) homes spoke this way. We were instructed to speak properly, and that manner of speaking was openly cited as incorrect and clunky and embarrassing. No teacher or adult would allow you to get away with it, and no one pretended there was “no such thing as class and correct speaking, it’s all you do you!”

If you watch my weekly show, you’ll often hear me doing voice impressions. One of them is a halting, badly pronounced version of what a six-year-old child sounds like when he’s just getting his speaking chops under him. That impression is based on (not “based off of”) the way low-class kids spoke when I was growing up. The kids who kept saying “ba-sketti” long after they were old enough to know better.

When I do that vocal impression, I’m now mocking professional adults in their 30s. Yes. They literally sound exactly like uneducated little kids from barely literate families in my youth. As their generation would say, it’s “not a good look” (or sound).

It’s one thing for a five-year-old to do it. But when kids still spoke that way at 10, or God forbid, later, they were socially marked out as low-status.

Now, that low-status manner of speaking has been normalized by the middle class white kids. And yes, I think it comes down almost entirely to a bizarre, almost erotic fetishization of thug rap black culture.