The Word on the Street

McWhorter (linguistics, U. of California-Berkeley) describes common American English for lay readers. Denying the existence of a pure and correct form, he surveys the wide regional and ethnic variations in speech patterns and accents, explains that language constantly changes, places the controversy over Ebonics in the context of his research on dialects and creoles, and wonders whether we should take the movement for gender-neutrality as far as translating Shakespeare. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.