Justice for Zimmerman

Iannis_sl said:

We're coming for the french next.

No silent e's. Fuck your nonsense.

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We have lots of reasons to hate the French, but of them all, the silent e's are definitely top of the list.

Silent e's and stinky stinky cheese. Enough reason to soak the entire French nation in hellfire from the sky.

Tanoomba_sl said:

If it makes you more comfortable to consider Ebonics a dialect, that's fine. I'm not "lowering the bar" for anyone.

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Saying that bad grammar plus pop culture is a language is, in fact, lowering the bar for everyone.

But to accuse Jeantel of not being able to communicate properly is wrong.

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She clearly can't communicate properly, as per her multiple television interviews and her two straight days of testimony that got George Zimmerman off for killing her friend. You're basically telling us to believe you, over what we watched in the trial, what we've seen of her in multiple interviews, etc.

She can communicate just fine within the community she was raised.

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This is a nonsense argument pretending to be a standard. If I grow up in a group of wolves, I can communicate with them. Doesn't mean I can communicate properly with a broader society. Essentially, again, this argument is composed of soft expectations bigotry. You've lowered the metric for what society would consider being able to effectively communicate to "Being able to effectively communicate with the people you grew up with." This is a clear example of academics getting ahold of a concept and watering it down to make themselves feel better. If you can't effectively communicate with the broader society you are a part of, you can't communicate. The worst part about Jeantel's inability to communicate, Tanoomba, is this:

She was Martin's friend. She clearly had serious issues with authority figures. The entire encounter that led to Martin's death was based on this fact. Martin, and Jeantel, both have trouble with authority figures. They want to "cuss them out" (Jeantel's own statement on Piers Morgan the other night was "I was raised right. I didn't cuss the Defense lawyers out on the stand!" for instance), confront them....fight with them. Zimmerman was called "Cracka" per Jeantel's own words "A name for someone like a police officer" someone in authority. Jeantel's inability to communicate effectively, to handle someone in authority asking her questions without resorting to "Dat's rel retarted, SIR!" was a mirror for Martin's reaction to Zimmerman that night. It was illustrative. It was...a large part of what got Zimmerman off. Why? Because it showed that the reasonable assumption that Martin returned from his house to confront Zimmerman was probably more accurate than any other interpretation of the evidence available.

She's just going to have to make an effort to communicate better outside of that community if she wants to be taken seriously and have better opportunities in life.

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Then she's not an effective communicator. If the only people you can communicate effectively with are your family and friends, and in every other instance you come across as stone dumb and unable to communicate in a broader society, guess what you are not? An effective communicator.

The preconception that there are no "rules" with Ebonics is wrong.

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No, its not. Your own statement includes why

The rules they follow are not explicit, nor are they as consistent as "conventional" English

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If you don't have the capacity to explicitly write them down, because they aren't consistent, then they aren't rules. They aren't standardized, they aren't formalized. This is the very definition of the term rules.

Pronouncing "ask" as "axe" is another one. You might hear "Where you at?" as broken English, but to people who've primarily spoken that way, it's systematic and completely normal.

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No, its not systematic, it deviates from one person to another and from one inner city population to another, without any codified or proper structure or format. Whether someone who speaks retard English thinks its okay or not is irrelevant. I if writing start doing this like, what guess happen not did? I didn't just create a new language. That's what. I just wrote a bunch of nonsense. According to your logic, what I just wrote was a new language, I accept it as normal, it allows me to effectively communicate with others, and the system, despite being entirely made up out of whole cloth in a half a second, is structured enough to warrant considering it a new language. This is the reductio ad absurdum of your position.

Cad_sl said:

Who gives a fuck about Ebonics one way or the other to give it more than 5 seconds of your brainpower?

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This discussion began because a few people actually tried to argue the media's narrative that Jeantel speaks "Three languages fluently" was accurate, and the media has been using it as proof that she's smarter than all these evil people on the internet dogging her for her two day disaster on the stand during the trial, who are all just racist anyway. See also: Every post Numbers makes in this thread.