Volume 22, Number 12 · July 17, 1975
American, Black, Creole, Pidgin, and Spanglish English
By Monroe K. Spears
All-American English
by J.L. Dillard
Random House, 369 pp., $15.00
J.L. Dillard is the author of Black English, which I praised in The New York Review (November 16, 1972) as an important work, controversial but certainly both significant and useful, as well as entertaining. It was a hard act to follow, and Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives anyway; so when I undertook this review I dreaded finding myself cast in the slapstick role of 'heah-come-dejedge' which requires me to pronounce the verdict that the author's second book is inferior to his first and then hit him over the head with an outsize rubber gavel. Well, that which I most feared has come upon me.
Review, 4209 words
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