Student Zone

"�JUNTOS PODEMOS!"

This handout is a collection of quotes, notes, and observations relevant to our reading of James Baldwin, Ilan Stavans, and Bharati Mukherjee.

Encapsulated development of English (just the broad strokes):
Old English (Germanic) --> Latin incorp. from Roman missionaries --> Norman Invasion (1066)/English Frenchified --> Middle English (5 major dialects)/Chaucer --> Early Modern English (Shakespeare) --> Conquest of the New World, incorporation of indigenous languages and Spanish (e.g. vaquero becomes buckaroo, barbacoa becomes barbecue) --> Continuing immigration & diaspora make for MexiStani, Fr�ngles, Blaxicans, Cubonics, the Blackcent, etc.

ANECDOTES: bulshiter�a (Guatemalan friends), fahita (Alma Pita restaurant), puro party (Texas)

�The first American colonists had perforce to invent Americanisms if only to describe the unfamiliar landscape and weather, flora and fauna confronting them. � But this occasional tolerance for things American was never extended to the American language. Most of the English books of travel mentioned Americanisms only to revile them � The climax came in 1863, when the Very Rev. Henry Alford, D.D. dean of Canterbury, printed his �Plea for the Queen�s English.� He said: �Look at the process of deterioration which our Queen�s English has undergone at the hands of the Americans.�� (Mencken 3 and 27)

antibaby: �birth control pill� (Stavans 69)
bananaspli: �banana split� (Stavans 74)
cat: �Dude, hipster, a righteous groover� (D�charn� 26)
el cheapo: ��cheap�

hip-hop: ��a subculture esp. of inner-city youths whose amusements include rap music, graffiti, and break dancing��
hipiteca: �Aztec hippy� (Stavans 143)
loco: �mentally disordered: CRAZY, FRENZIED�

�On and on, Latinos� marketing popularity is uncritically treated as a sign of their �coming of age� in U.S. society or else, equally uncritically, condemned as a sign of their commodification; but seldom have studies looked at marketing as constitutive of U.S. Latinidad. � In these constructions the Spanish language is built as the paramount basis of U.S. Latinidad.� (D�vila 3-4)

�There is no Americano dream. There is only the American dream created by an Anglo-Protestant society. Mexican Americans will share in that dream and in that society if they dream in English.� (Huntington 45)

Works Cited
D�vila, Arlene. Latinos Inc.: The Marketing and Making of a People. Berkeley: UC Press, 2001.

D�charn�, Max. Straight From the Fridge, Dad: A Dictionary of Hipster Slang. NY: Broadway Books, 2000.

�El cheapo.� Merriam-Webster�s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1999.

�Hip-hop.� Merriam-Webster�s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1999.

Huntington, Samuel. �The Hispanic Challenge.� Foreign Policy March/April 2004: 30-45.

�Loco.� Merriam-Webster�s Collegiate Dictionary. 10th ed. 1999.

Mencken, H.L. The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States. 4th ed. NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938.

Stavans, Ilan. Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language. NY: HarperCollins, 2003.

Posted by Benjamin at September 21, 2005 08:17 PM