Slang and its' limits.

[Sir Alec]

I have just heard a man talking on the streets of Manchester. He said, 'A now wot am sayin man, its da pigs dats da problem. De don no wats goin on in dis town cos de are pigs, man.
I would be ashamed if this was my son, if only for his lack of literacy. And by the way, he was white!

[ummmm]

I think I might slap my kids if they spoke like that. You know the kind of slap you give to hysterical women?

[Sir Alec]

Or hysterical men, I have met them, I assure you!

[wildwood]

It seems to be a recent popular pastime to try to talk in Ghetto speak for uneducated young men. Unfortunately, they rarely succeed properly and it only make them appear even more silly.

[excelsior-1]

i cannot even make it out..it looks like a foreign language

[FredPuli43]

Be surprising if he speaks like that when he's forty. In the 50's you'd hear young men talking 'jive'. They're grandfathers now. Haven't heard any grandads talking like it lately.

[Mosaic]

Gangsta is regrettably mandatory in many subculture zones if one wishes to avoid a kicking.

[jake-the-peg]

Literacy is about the written language

I'd be ashamed if you were my father for your inappropriate use of language!

You don't think earwigging someone else's conversation and then getting all snobby about it is at all ironic?

There is a long history of people corrupting language to avoid being overheard by the police or the likes of you.

Cockney Rhyming slang is supposed to have been used for this purpose in French Verlan serves a similar purpose.

You might like to think that if you don't understand - maybe it's not that they are stupid - maybe you're not meant to!

[VivienneM]

You cannot really criticise people for lacking literacy when there is a totally unnecessary apostrophe in your question title. Belonging to it = its

[jno]

that sounds like a matter of pronunciation rather than vocabulary. English pronunciation has changed a few times over the years, sometimes quite dramatically

http://en.wikipedia.o...iki/Great_Vowel_Shift

No telly then, so I blame that Geoffrey Chaucer

[Kiki-frog]

Sir Alec - I bet he had his trousers half way down his @rse as well!

Personally I can't stand this way of talking. It's just as affected as people trying to talk like the queen when they have a perfectly good regional accent of their own.

[ll_billym]

Actually the only 'slang' in that sentence is the word 'pigs' and I think most people would know that he meant the police.

The rest of the words are not slang words but are a spoken dialect, it is fine to say that you do not understand it but I have real trouble with thick Scottish accents also but I don't assume people cannot read (the correct meaning of the word 'illiteracy') because of the way they speak.

[ludwig]

Apparently it's the pigs that are the problem. They don't know what's going on in the town because they're pigs.

I reckon there must have been a young farmer's convention nearby and you overheard them discussing livestock issues in their yokelish country accents.

[baza]

i overheard two young gents talking about the feds......i thought they meant the parcel delivery people.

[jake-the-peg]

AAVE

http://en.wikipedia.o...an_Vernacular_English

[heathfield]

That's no way to talk about perlice officahs!

[boxtops]

It's all to do with rap music, it's the current trend. It's like speaking in code.

[dave50]

There is a well known word for white people like that. Of course I am not allowed to write it or say it because of the thought police but it starts with a 'W' and ends in 'er'.

[hc4361]

Why you say 'whigger'?

[factor-fiction]

Haven't many young people always spoken in code? I recall at school 40 years ago some students would switch the front and end of words round and we talked in slang, and my mum says the same used to happen when she was at school (maybe it was a grammar school thing)

[hc4361]

factor - backslang!