"They All Poison"
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@mayjay lol. that’s ridiculous
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All this conversation ain’t satisfactioning me.
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@mayjay when you refer to backgrounds, do you mean inner city blacks? Or something else?
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@cragarhawk Me too! I prefer when she just stands there and looks purdy.
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@HighEliteMajor All of his players are African-American, half are Southern, most are urban. It is not a unique observation to note that the youth in this demographic often speaks in that style, as do many white kids. Rappers of all races use it, too.
Unlike my grandparents, from rural Iowa whose use reflected lack of education beyond 8th grade and lifelong immersion in groups with similar backgrounds, the current usage appears voluntary and seems designed to reflect a “cool” aura. Like the 4.6 gpa HS senior linebacker next door who talks to us in the best damned English I ever heard, but who talks with his friends precisely as Davis did in that quote.
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Obviously, I can’t get no satisfaction.
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You all re-dikew-lus
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@mayjay Your music examples are silly and irrelevant. That’s art.
I’m talking about business, which is where a coach, a role model, is talking like an idiot. My sole point is always this – if you talk like an idiot, regardless of whether your African American, Eskimo American, Australian American, or just you prefer to just be known as American, you have a reason for an employer NOT to hire you. You can talk all you want about culture, or whatever, but I’m not hiring anyone who talks like that. Some might like to normalize it, and that speaks to the continued deterioration of our society, but if you want a job and want to improve your lot in life, try speaking properly.
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@HighEliteMajor Are you talking about a sports coach or an English professor? I don’t want my English prof. teaching football or my football coach teaching English. (In the 7th grade they were one and the same for me and I didn’t learn Shakespearean words on the field, but the vocab was definitely different than in the hallways).
It’s amazing to me that so many African Americans have to have an interview voice/change their speech pattern. They simply can’t be themselves and expect to get a job In corporate America. It’s terrible as slang/accent is more of a reflection of your environment than your intelligence. Otherwise every southern man I’ve ever met is a moron, but we all know that’s far from the truth.
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@cragarhawk You listen to the singing? I simply leer…
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@approxinfinity Shania is a hottie. She can mispronounce words all day as long as she bats her eyes at me…
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KUSTEVE said:
@approxinfinity Shania is a hottie. She can mispronounce words all day as long as she bats her eyes at me…
You know - -I use to be a big Shania Twain fan many moons ago lol, you right she can bat away lol
She actually got her start when here daddy would take her to the honky tonk bars after they closed and she would sing for the customers when she was a little girl - - NO I said SING when she was A LITLE GIRL so you stop with those thoughts lol, she didn’t go there when she got older lol. - -well MAYBE she did. - -Ended up marrying her stage manager. - - ROCK CHALK ALL DAY LONG BABY
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@HighEliteMajor I think he already has a job, but I agree that a minority had better adhere to majority expectations when interviewing because of the established prejudice against minority culture and language. Thanks for making that point.
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Davis sounds like he is a coach in the 3rd Ward in Houston. Ed Orgeron sounds like a coach in Baton Rouge. Are accents and colloquialisms now considered bad? I guess Bum Phillips could be included in that too. Heck, I might be in trouble, too.
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@KUSTEVE you are not, remember, character counts!🦃🦃🦃 have a great turkey day!
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Mike Davis grew up in a small Alabama town. He currently coaches at an HBCU in Houston which is very much southern. I stuck out a lot at KU because I have a much different accent than most at KU because there aren’t a lot of kids who grew up in Houston at KU.
Bill Self absolutely has a big small town Oklahoma/Midwest accent that would stick out like a sore thumb if he coached on either coast.
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I think Davis was trying to make a very simple point. Here’s a coach that knew going into the game that his team was going to be overmatched by KU. He was asked a classic coachspeak question about picking your poison, and he replied in a simple way that conveyed both his respect for KU’s talent, and his frustration at not having an answer - “they all poison”.
Could he have used proper grammar and said “All of the players at the University of Kansas are talented enough offensively to be considered poisonous to the opponent.”
Sure, but that seems silly.
Remember Jim Mora’s “Playoffs? Don’t talk about—playoffs?! You kidding me? Playoffs?!” rant. That’s not perfect English, but it conveys the point perfectly.
Let’s remember, language is about conveying ideas. Sometimes, those ideas are best conveyed through the use of the grammatical rules because the discussion is in a formal setting. At other times, the formality can be discarded to convey an idea through colloquialism, knowing that the audience will understand the point. This is often done to be humorous or sarcastic. That’s all Davis was doing here.
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@justanotherfan Perhaps we could have Barbara Billingsley come in and translate whenever it is too offensive to some ears. As I recall, she very memorably “speaks jive.”
In a more direct reply to you, it reminds me of refined wordsmith William F. Buckley’s defense of his having used the word “crap” in an essay. He was pilloried for being crude and for setting a bad example. (“But what about the children?”) As he pointed out, sometimes the less refined way of talking gets the point across more eloquently than refined speech ever could.
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@KUSTEVE U2. I have prepared myself to consume mass quantities.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 Exactly.
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HighEliteMajor said:
@mayjay Yes. But I get more interested when a coach role modeling for kids that will need to speak English to get a job, speaks like an idiot.
Gotta get on Bill Self’s case too when he talks about not playing good.
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@mayjay Doing your usual foolish dance again. No one said it’s offensive. You can make up whatever you want. It’s just dishonest. The sole point – sole point – is that being a role model to young men, all of whom will need jobs, is better accomplished by using the type of grammar that will be more likely to gain one a professional job.
Of course, the offended masses can mock the point. But using proper English is not an outrageous suggestion, if you are really a role model for young men and really interested in their success.
One major advantage in the business world, like it or not, is to be able to speak intelligently.
@justanotherfan Fyi, and I appreciate your discussion, everything you’ve said is known and understood.
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You are absolutely correct in your comments but it seems that those who think this way are in the minority anymore. Unfortunately we live in a society that no longer strives for improvement towards excellence but caters to the lowest common denominator.
For example, you can see just about all the younger kids repeating the words to rap lyrics without even realizing what they are saying. A few weeks ago when my grandson and girlfriend (both Johnson County teens) stopped by and kept repeating rap lyrics playing on his cell phone, I pulled the lyrics on the laptop and had him read them slowly. He was absolutely embarrassed not as much by the atrocious English but most of all for their misogynistic words; I don’t believe either had really thought about what they were parroting. I guess it is politically incorrect to point out the damage this type of rap music causes to our society and particularly black culture; easier to blame the cops than rap stars.
PS. This is NOT a political statement by my personal view on the status of our society.
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@HighEliteMajor “Usual foolish dance.” Coming from you, a compliment.
As to being offended, gosh, that first post sounded an awful lot like it. My ability to read must be diminishing.
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@chriz Bill is not in the particular target group.
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One thing I find highly ironic is how often people who make strong comments on the internet about a person using improper grammar so often use “your” instead of “you’re,” and do not seem to adhere to established rules of punctuation. Then they would defend that by saying that the meaning was clear and no one expects perfection on the internet. Just in post-game interviews, where speech must meet formal business rules.
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@JayHawkFanToo My teachers, and yours, too (probably), always said a preposition was an improper thing to end a sentence with. Usually, you could see about half the class wondering why the other half was laughing.
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This discussion is the epitome of white privilege. Because I work with quite a few African Americans, male and female, this was a topic that I was always curious about so I have had some conversations here and there on the topic to try and gain a better understanding of what the phrase really means and entails.
This is a prime example of white privilege. Why is there even a need to bring this topic up? How many times have we heard Bill Self use improper grammar in a halftime interview or a post game press conference? Why has his bad grammar never been mentioned before when it happens?
Why is it that when an African American coach uses poor grammar in a press conference, it’s something worth pointing out?
White privilege is not the blatantly obvious things, it’s subtle things like this that you don’t think about until other people mention it.
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It’s embarrassing to me that grown-ass people, presumably intelligent grown-ass people, are whining and crying about grammar and punctuation. This is a KU site, folks - not UK.
Seagulls - STOP IT NOW.
PS - Sorry about the grammar and punctuation mishaps.
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PLEASE LOCK THIS THREAD. Unbelievable.
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@KUSTEVE You did it with all that Shania lust.
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mayjay said:
@JayHawkFanToo My teachers, and yours, too (probably), always said a preposition was an improper thing to end a sentence with. Usually, you could see about half the class wondering why the other half was laughing.
I see what you did
. However, according to linguists, ending a sentence with a preposition is mostly a myth and has been considered acceptable for a long time; at least this what my teachers taught me. As you showed, often enough removing the preposition results in better syntax and a more readable sentence as in…preposition was an improper thing to end a sentence. No laughs.
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@KUSTEVE amen. I thought this was about the game, not a grammar debate. Good grief
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@HawkChamp I mean…come on. One guy doesn’t like the way a guy phrased a sentence, and we call him a racist??? In that case, I guess my mother is a racist because she can’t tolerate grammatical errors!?! I am 100% positive if HEM moved to Houston, he would cringe a million times a day the way that people talked. That doesn’t make him hate black people. If you heard me talk, I sound a hell of alot more like Coach Davis than I do Coach Self. Now, I don’t normally defend HEM but the bit about “white privilege” made me almost throw up. Enough. Please lock the thread.
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@KUSTEVE No, those things don’t show him to be a racist. It usually requires a pretty substantial body of work to draw those conclusions.
For the record, “white privilege” is not the same as racism. It is a term that attempts to describe the cultural/racial/economical factors affecting the lenses through which people view disputes.
For example, I grew up in Prairie Village. Walked 2 blocks to the Jones Store for my 15 to 25 hr/week job, and could have had jobs at any number of other stores. No crime, school had no gangs, parents able to lend me a car on snowy nights, and I was earning money solely for my own entertainment. If I read in the paper about the problems facing inner city youth such as drugs and dropping out, my instinctive reaction might be to suggest that they go get jobs.
My suggestion would have been shaped by my background, but would not be racist. It would instead reflect my lack of awareness of how few opportunities might be available for jobs for inner city youths, and also reflect my mistaken belief that my upbringing could be generalized to anyone of HS age.
That would be talking from white privilege. Refusing to realize my advantages and making mental adjustments based on other realities? That would probably be racist.
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I think maybe we should reframe this conversation. My apologies if I glossed over someone making the same point. If we recognize that both Shania and Mike Davis are using dialects, rather that attempting to identify how their word choices are incorrect by a common set of grammatical rules, it becomes a moot point. Let’s move on, come on y’all!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_American_Vernacular_English?wprov=sfla1
See “The copula be in the present tense is often dropped, as in Russian, Hebrew, Arabic and other languages” in the above link.
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Was anyone critical over “That’s what speed do”?
Embrace it, team! “We all poison!”
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I’ll be honest I didn’t think this thread would break 50 replies.
