Charlie and I watch a lot of crime docudramas on TV which draw attention to the (unfortunately) ugly underbelly of American society.
Suspects and perpetrators of crimes who are brought “down to headquarters” to be interviewed/interrogated often reveal their ignorance of proper English. Typically, the grammar-challenged citizens are urban street people, druggies, thieves, and gang members, but rural America’s redneck population is well-represented, too. Lot’s of horrible crimes are committed in the Bible Belt by God-fearing White folks. Opioid addiction is big there, and leads to lots of robberies and break-ins. Marital discord also leads to crimes of violence.
One common denominator in this sub-set of society is poverty. Most of the folks who end up at the police station are desperate people who have resorted to desperate measures to feed themselves and their families or to satisfy their drug habit. The other commonality of this group of neer-do-wells is limited education. Whether they lacked educational opportunity or misused that which they were given is unknown, but it seems that most of these miscreants weren’t paying much attention in English class.
Here are a few gems from a sample of police interrogations:
“I ain’t did that!”
“Somebody dead and killed was there…”
“Her and her Mom”
“Nobody had no gun”
“They done went…”
“We might could get…”
“No one has came forward” (a police officer said this!)
“I been got rid of that car”
“I been knowin’ him for five years”
“Don’t nobody have a key to my car”
“He was him”
“He ain’t want to go”
“Everyone knowed each other”
I can imagine one of these citizens, who wants to straighten out his life, going to a job interview, speaking this kind of bastardized English, and being shown the door… because hiring the individual would bring ridicule on the company.
Sure, the guy might be hired as a janitor or dishwasher, something in the back end of the business where he won’t be seen by the public. But is that kind of job really going to raise the fellow “up by the bootstraps’? Probably not; he’d still have to commit crimes after work hours to feed his family and pay the bills.
In the inner city neighborhoods and redneck boondocks that produce illiterate citizens like this, I wonder how much admonition is given by teachers to students about “talking stupid” and how that is going to minimize opportunity down the road of life. First impressions are critical in social intercourse, and someone who expresses themselves in crude English (be it “country talk”, “Ebonics”, “Spanglish” or whatever) basically paints a Scarlett Letter on their forehead revealing the bearer to be a non-serious person.
Of course, in the “hood” or out in the “boonies”, talking like this is probably necessary to gain “cred” among the low-life, criminal set. A guy speaking the King’s English would probably mark himself as an undercover cop or, at least, not a serious player in the criminal community. He would be suspect, for sure.
A fellow who has served prison time and plans on toeing the line after release is, unfortunately, going to be bringing his crude language skills with him when he re-enters society and tries to better himself.
Anything more than menial work/manual labor will be almost impossible to achieve without going back to school to… re-learn the things that he determined weren’t worth the bother back in grade school. That’s a tough row to hoe, and is one of the reasons that recidivism (felons returning to criminal activity) is so high.
“Imma be honest wit ya”