Tuesday, March 8, 2016

This might give me the best venue to collect the English as Butchered by Talking Heads and Reality Show Personalities into a cohesive arrangement to help people who really do want to express themselves clearly, hopefully by way of humorous examples of how poor habits can wind up in impossible constructions of unintended meanings.  It's pointless to say this because each post goes to the bottom, so an introduction is moot -ish.

In addition to mangled English or poorly understood construction, of note is "History According to Real Housewives, Specifically those of Atlanta."  Porsha [sic] Williams, the granddaughter of civil rights figure Josea Williams, on seeing breathing holes drilled in the floor of a southern church which was a stop on the Underground Railroad, expressed great concern that the conductor didn't have a place to sit.  This is not a little girl: she's a big one, graduated from a local black university, and proud to say she is the granddaughter of a civil rights leader.  One of the ladies, an entertainment attorney, said, gently, "It's not a real train, honey.  Oh dear.  Oh dear."

Recently, Cynthia Bailey of the Cynthia Bailey modelling agency and BravoTV's "The Real Housewives of Atlanta" was given tickets to see "Race" and asked to comment on it.  Her take was that Jesse Owens "won the race in spite of his race."  In spite of his race?  Oh my. No, in the face of Adolph Hitler and the (1932?) Munich Olympics in which The Master Race was to dominate.  Jesse Owens in spite of and in the face of the Nazi party's beliefs in a light-skinned Master Race "won the race;" he won the race in spite of the danger he might have been in by winning, as a black person, in the belly of the beast into which the Nazi party would turn Germany in the coming years.  The words "he won in spite of his race" holds a tacit agreement to an inferior position.  It shaky syntax.  Perhaps she meant to say that Jesse Owens stood up to the man who believed in a Master Race and the natural inferiority of darker races and proved him wrong in front of the world; he went to the Olympics knowing what hostility he would be facing as a black athlete, and in spite of the openly expressed beliefs of the host country about the inferiority of non-Aryan races, Jesse Owens took the gold medal in track: a national embarrassment for the Nazi party, and he stood alone, facing down Hitler. If anything, Jesse Owens, like many of the black athletes dominating sports in the US, won not in spite of his race, but because of it, in spite of the hate-filled rhetoric that fearful little men who become dictators, such as Adolph Hitler, believe and spew.

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