BidenbeatTrump

Anyway, getting back to the thing: I’m fascinated by AAVE (even though I keep having to look up what things mean.) So many words and phrases that encapsulate meanings more concisely than American English!

Like, the concept of being “woke” - there are layers of meaning underneath the metaphor of being awake = social justice awareness and all of them please the etymologist in me

Or “throwing shade”, the concept of an intended insult that can be plausibly denied. I just love that phrase.

It all speaks to me in the way that I notice Hiberno-English has words and phrases for ideas for which you need cultural context or else they don’t make sense. So this comes back to a problem I have, sometimes.

Dialects bleed into each other very easily, especially online, and we can naturally start using words and phrases from other dialects as our language evolves. I’m pretty sure this evolution happens much faster due to the Internet btw

I’ve been mulling on the idea of using AAVE words and phrases in a fantasy book in the language of the upper class. -because it plays with the reader’s expectations -because it has concise meanings I want to use -because I find it has an elegance to it that I want to explore

But: the wholesale exploitation of black culture is goddamn rampant and do I want to be a part of that? Could I even execute it well? Would I be another Awkwafina, for example? Language evolves, yes, but perhaps it should matter how it evolves.

In my writing, I have only one rule: First, do no harm. You don’t have to make the world a better place, but you shouldn’t make it any worse. Including this particular idea could make it worse in a small, insignificant way, especially if I cock it up.