African American Vernacular English

Current theories assume that all ellipsis phenomena can be licensed by a feature occupying a preceding functional head (Lobeck 1995, Merchant 1999, 2004). In this paper, however, I show that feature-based treatments cannot account for licensing of verb phrase and noun phrase ellipsis (predicate ellipsis) in American English and African American English (AAE) through evidence that these functional heads must be phonologically overt. AAE is particularly important to establish this generalization due to the fact that production of auxiliary be and the possessive ’s morpheme is typically optional preceding a full predicate, yet experimental evidence from this paper confirms that this optionality disappears in elliptical contexts. The analysis proposed here entails that predicate ellipsis, inwhich overtness is required, and clausal ellipsis,wherein the head said to license ellipsis is necessarily silent, are subject to different licensing conditions.

While a number of sociolinguistic studies have examined intraspeaker variation and how it allows a speaker to negotiate identities related to class, much of the existing work on speakers and their physically-delimited communities has focused on interspeaker variation. The present study examines (th) and (dh)-stopping in two sociolinguistic interviews conducted as part of the Language and Communication in the District of Columbia (LCDC) project (Schilling and Podesva 2008). It examines topic-related style-shifting in two African American speakers, matched for age, from one neighborhood in the District of Columbia known for its high integration and cross-racial acceptance. As Washington, D.C. is a city whose rate of racial segregation is increasing (US Census 2010), I argue that these speakers use this ethnoracially-marked phonological variant in topic-based style shifting as a means of aligning with the race-neutral identity of the community of Takoma. Statistical results, supported by discourse analyses of the content of both speakers' talk, reveal that both speakers vary their rates of the stopped variant to contrast constructed dialogue of Takoma residents and non-Takoma residents and in talk about their relationships with their community in ways which reinforce the indexical links they make between themselves and the reification of Takoma as racially-neutral, integrated space. Many studies have shown that processes understood to be indexical of racial and class identities on an interspeaker level also function on an intraspeaker level (e.g. Rickford and McNair-Knox 1994). This study provides evidence that speakers' indexical relationships to their physical community can be studied at the level of the individual speaker as well.

Background/Context: The popularity surrounding culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) is notable primarily within language and literacy content areas but is also making its rounds in other disciplines. Because of its assumed objectivity and status, the mathematics discipline has long been a site of disrupting or perpetuating inequity and thus warrants our focus in thinking about how any pedagogical framework influences the success of Black students. We question whether the ideology undergirding CSP is beneficial to the ways in which we seek to educate Black mathematics learners through a philosophy of mathematics education that prioritizes language, and Black English more specifically. Purpose/Objective: The objective of this theoretical paper is to take a closer look at the shift in education research that has drawn attention away from asset-based frameworks, like culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) or culturally responsive teaching, to focus on CSP. We seek to address how Black children may be positioned by the ideologies proposed in CSP, particularly in the way that culture, and Blackness in itself, is performed. Our goal is to highlight potential oversights in this framework and to discuss whether CSP represents a viable solution for Black students, particularly in regard to their mathematics education. Research Design: We elucidate the genesis of CSP and establish its roots as in tension with a Black ontology by tracing the theoretical origins of two scholars known best for its conceptualization.

This focus of this paper is to present an overview of the current research which examines the language and literacy performance of African American children who speak African American Vernacular English (AAVE), as presented from a deficit versus difference perspective. Language and literacy and assessment and remediation of AAVE speakers are discussed in sections one and two. Section three of the paper provides theoretical and methodological suggestions to educational psychologists, speech pathologists and developmental psychologists investigating AAVE speakers, on ways to gain a better appreciation for, and understanding of, the intricacies associated with African American Vernacular English. The paper closes with a discussion of the litigation and controversies surrounding AAVE.

Phonological characteristics of a voice, such as th-stopping (pronouncing them as " dem ") associated with African American English (AAE), provide indexical sociolinguistic information about the speaker. Word usage also signals this social dialect, i.e. usage of crib to mean house. The current study examines the effect of these sociolinguistic characteristics on word recall, as well as the interaction between the phonological and the lexical levels of variation. In a modified word recognition task, listeners displayed more accurate veridical word recall of AAE lexical items and voices. Furthermore, there was an interaction between phonological and lexical variation: listeners were even more accurate at recognizing AAE-specific lexical items heard in an AAE voice. This study adds to a growing body of work finding that sociolinguistic information influences word memory.

After the audacious study and profound interest in Latin literature by the autodidact Charles Chesnutt is presented, this contribution argues that, unlike scholarship up to now pointing to orally-passed African American folktales, many of Chesnutt's Conjure Woman stories are in fact variations of selected stories from Ovid's masterpiece Metamorphoses. This claim is underscored by citing specific incidences of conjuring of North Carolina slaves into animals and trees in Chesnutt's stories with the magic (Voodoo) transformations of characters in selections of Metamorphoses by Ovid.  This use of Ovid by Chesnutt is argued to be an example of "signifying" as described in the theory of African American rhetoric by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his study, The Signifying Monkey.

This study focuses on listener perceptions of African American English (AAE) on Twitter, examining both grammatical and ungrammatical usages, as well as how these perceptions may be affected by the race of the speaker and rater. We conducted an experimental survey designed to address the following questions: 1. Does avatar race affect perception of the grammaticality of AAE? 2. Are differences between grammatical and ungrammatical AAE discernible to naive raters of different races? 3. How are various social attributes evaluated for avatars of different races and different linguistic varieties? Results indicate that participants generally do not downgrade avatars who use grammatical AAE on ratings of grammaticality or personal characteristics. However, participants of all races disprefer ungrammatical uses of AAE, with black raters being especially sensitive to ungrammatical AAE. These findings have implications for sociolinguistics in that they demonstrate that participants across racial backgrounds may differentiate grammatical versus ungrammatical AAE online, and that contrary to expectations based on previous literature, AAE is not universally downgraded in these contexts. However, results also indicate that the use of AAE still negatively impacts listeners' perceptions of speakers as educated, demonstrating that some widespread biases against AAE-speakers persist in an online context.

Abstract

In this paper I analyze what I argue are erroneous assumptions of scientific neutrality, especially with regard to the science of linguistics. That is to say, I will seek to deconstruct the notion that science is inherently neutral and replace this notion with one that accounts for specific ideological formations and the influence that they exact. Questions of ideology, though salient, are often overlooked in favor of a reliance on the veracity scientific inquiry. Thus, ideological predispositions often times go unchallenged, which is especially problematic when the subject group, in this case African Americans, are not the ones telling their own stories. In this paper I seek to uncover the ideological weight that informs the rhetoric surrounding African American Vernacular English. And, correspondingly, I will analyze the writings of important African American linguists to highlight what I believe to be the consequence of this pervasive ideological influence.

Americans constitute the majority of the world"s native speakers of English (about 240 million people), compared with about 57 million speakers in Britain. (Tottie, 2002:1) In relation to the history of the English Language, however, the history of American English (Am.E.), is comparably short. English was brought to America by colonists in the 17 th century, and through various linguistic processes, rapidly developed a uniformity and standardisation of its own, with a unique pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar. The rapid

African American Vernacular English is a variant of English spoken mostly by black people in the United States. But while it is called African American Vernacular English, the language cannot be defined racially because not all black Americans speak this variety of English, and there are also people who are not black Americans but may still speak it, sometimes even  natively. And then again, some people use only some features of this variant, for example vocabulary, so it is also difficult to define who actually speaks it.

This paper seeks to complicate two primary norms within argumentation theory: 1- engaging with one’s interlocutors in a ‘pleasant’ tone and 2- speaking directly to one’s target audience/interlocutor.  Moreover, I urge argumentation theorists to explore various cultures’ argumentative norms and practices when attempting to formulate more universal theories regarding argumentation. Ultimately, I aim to show that the two previously mentioned norms within argumentation obscures and misrepresents many argumentative practices within African American Vernacular English – or Ebonics, specifically the art of signifying.

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Contents
1. Introduction

2. Methods

3. Results
3.1.1. Tupac Shakur
3.1.2. “Changes”
3.1.3. “White Man’s World”
3.1.4. “Ghetto Gospel”
3.1.5. Keep Ya Head Up”
3.1.6. „Until the End of Time“
3.2.1. Eminem
3.2.2. “Public Enemy #1”
3.2.3. “Like Toy Soldiers”
3.2.4. “We as Americans”
3.2.5. “White America”
3.2.6. “My Name Is”

4. Discussion

5. Resources:

6. Appendices

Sociolinguistics of Hip Hop music is a relatively new field in sociolinguistics and deals with both social and linguistic aspects of AAVE. Many studies were conducted to analyse Hip Hop lyrics, with both Tupac and Eminem as the target artists; Tupac being the explicitly angry rebel against racial segregation and Eminem being the sarcastic and incredibly eloquent young man who had managed to enter the Hip Hop safe zone of African-Americans and strike them dumb. However, a detailed comparison study of AAVE features and variations between the two was not yet conducted, or at least published. This small-scale research study aims to analyse five of the most popular songs by each artist, to quantify, compare and contrast AAVE features in some of the most popular lyrics globally and to provide an option for the social background of each song, analysing their purpose, message and language. This paper will answer two of the most obvious questions in Hip Hop sociolinguistics, i.e. whether there is any difference in use of AAVE features between a black rapper and a white rapper, where both are considered masters of their profession. Another question is whether any of them is linguistically “better” than the other, i.e. leaning towards SE. A common string of features was analysed and quantified for the purpose of comparison and the results were somewhat surprising. However, the songs which were selected have a serious background to them, possibly affecting both artists’ use of language.

Classroom practices that simultaneously address cultural identity and academic language have the potential to increase students’ attachment to school while expanding their language repertoires. The set of studies collected here examine the study of language in school as a natural intersection between student identity and academic content.

The three studies that make up this dissertation attempt to identify teaching practices that address cultural identity and academic content through teaching about language. All three studies draw on recent research in sociolinguistics to validate the wide range of language varieties that students bring to school. The studies also draw on linguistic anthropology to identify the impact of beliefs about language within the micro- level context of the classroom and the macro-level societal context. In particular, the studies make use of the concept of language ideologies, beliefs about language as used in social contexts. These beliefs can follow dominant patterns supporting the primacy of Standard English, or be more critical of existing power relations that stigmatize or privilege certain language varieties.

Educational researchers have combined these concepts from sociolinguistcs and linguistic anthropology to create an emerging body of research on critical language awareness and critical language pedagogy. To date, research on these topics has been largely theoretical. The papers in this dissertation begin to shift the research base from theory into classroom practice.

All three papers draw on data collected during a study of five high school English teachers in the San Francisco Bay Area, teaching in culturally and linguistically complex classrooms. The teachers taught at different schools, although three taught within the same school district. The five teachers were selected because they each articulated aspects of a critical language ideology during initial interviews. In addition, they all taught instructional units around the core text Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston, a text featuring extensive use of African American English. Because the teachers articulated aspects of a critical language ideology and would be teaching a unit around a text featuring African American English, these classrooms were selected as likely sites to observe teaching and talk about language during literature-based English Language Arts instruction.

The first study examines the language ideologies communicated through teaching and talk about language during literature-based instruction. This study demonstrates the struggle of teaching with a critical language ideology in the face of dominant views of Standard English that pervade English classrooms and society at large. Drawing on data from teacher interviews and video recorded classes, this study uses a case study methodology to show how one teacher reflectively and deliberately used linguistic meta- language to consistently communicate the value of all language varieties. Contrasting cases illustrate points during classroom teaching where dominant language ideologies are likely to surface.

The second paper examines what teachers need to know to teach about language variation from a critical perspective. Using the framework of Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), the study examines the importance of valuing student knowledge as one aspect of pedagogical content knowledge for critical language teaching. The study employs micro-ethnographic discourse analysis of episodes of critical language teaching to show what happens when linguistic content knowledge and knowledge of language pedagogy are employed without attention to student understandings of language variation. The findings suggest that when student knowledge is not valued students may be resistant to linguistic terms and concepts.

The third study builds on the second study by exploring what students know and believe about language variation through an analysis of survey and interview data. The study explores students’ language ideologies in relation to a number of student characteristics including race/ethnicity, gender, home language, parental desire for the students to speak Standard English, and students’ awareness of their own use of English language varieties. Analysis of the survey data in conjunction with the interviews reveals that students simultaneously hold both dominant and counter-hegemonic language ideologies. Students possess nuanced understandings of the racialized nature of language varieties, but respond to those understandings in very different ways. The findings suggest that teachers need to explore students’ varied understandings as they attempt to teach about language variation in high school English classes.

Taken together these studies help move research on critical language pedagogy from theory to practice. The papers in this dissertation suggest a common theme; Teachers need to work toward understanding and valuing the prior knowledge and beliefs about language that their students bring to the classroom. Knowledge of linguistics and general pedagogy will have limited effectiveness without consideration of how approaches to teaching play out for particular students in particular contexts. Paper one highlights ways that teachers can maintain a critical language ideology even when students articulate dominant language ideologies. Paper two highlights the importance of valuing student knowledge when teaching critical language awareness. Paper three begins to unpack patterns in students’ knowledge and beliefs. As work on critical language pedagogy moves from theory to classroom practice, consideration of students must play a central role.

Whiteness, like all racial categories, is a mythic and cunning construct with little biological credibility but tremendous social power. Historically, White social dominance has been propped up not only by violence, political control, and socioeconomic configurations, but also by language ideology and linguistic practice. This entry explores several ways in which White advantages and subject positions have been constructed through language. It looks at the racial politics of colonial-era language policies and attitudes, and the racial hierarchy implicit in the contemporary valorization of “standard” language, particularly in the United States. It examines whiteness as a verbal performance and a matter of style, and how White borrowings from non-standard linguistic varieties have often functioned to affirm White racism. It describes how some non-white communities have mocked White language (and, by extension, the negative qualities they associate with whiteness). And it examines some of the linguistic strategies, from code choice to subtle discursive maneuvers, pursued by self-conscious Whites at pains to avoid accusations of racism.

This essay serves as a defense for the acceptance of the use of African American Vernacular English (hereafter AAVE) by Black people in professional and educational settings. It is racist and dehumanizing to shun, make fun of, fire, or otherwise mistreat Black people for their use of AAVE in professional and educational settings. This author discusses the long history of AAVE and African-Americans who use it (including the discrimination and racism its users have faced and still face), its influence on American society and culture, and why its use should be allowed, condoned, and accepted in classrooms and professional settings.

American English has plentiful of dialects, and one of the most recognized is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Often regarded as a “badly spoken English”, it gained recognition no earlier than 1977. Its roots date back to slavery times in the USA. Its origins are not clearly stated, but it is commonly believed to derive from pidgin and creole languages. On the contrary to popular opinions, AAVE has its own grammatical and phonological set of rules which govern its structure. Hip hop constitutes an important part of African American arts. The lyrics reflect social and economic situation of low-income African American youngsters and adolescents. Many AAVE elements are incorporated in rap songs. In result, translating rap lyrics poses a great challenge to any translator. Even though some deems it as untranslatable, translation theory offers a solid base to facilitate the process of rendering and to deal with culturally specific items. The main aim of this MA thesis is to analyze occurrence of AAVE elements in Jay Z’s lyrics, attempt to translate these elements, and analyze the outcome focusing on the possibility of rendering such elements into Polish.

Winner, Outstanding Publication Award, Society for Music Theory, Popular Music Interest Group, 2019.

The best-known track on Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, “Alright” has come to be regarded as a protest anthem, fueled by Lamar’s charged performances of the song at the BET Awards and the Grammys, and by accolades from the press that cite its political importance. This article argues that the actual musical track is ambiguous and open to several interpretations. To support this idea, I first explore the process through which the track came into being and how this process may have contributed to the song’s ambiguity. I then examine the message of “Alright,” contextualizing its place in the concept album and in the music video. I closely examine the musical track, analyzing its accent patterns using the metrical preference rules of Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983) and David Temperley (2001). This analysis of the track implies a 3+5 or 3+2+3 beat reading of the meter in addition to a straight 44. Using the linguistic tool Praat, I analyze the ways in which rappers Fabolous (who originally recorded on the track) and Lamar respond to this meter in their stresses, rhythms, and rhymes. I examine the well-known hook, which Pharrell Williams raps with a striking rise in pitch. This rise lends itself to several possible interpretations, due to differences in intonation between African American English and standard American English, coupled with Williams’s fluency in both. Finally, I analyze the ways that protesters have performed and interpreted the hook differently from the recording, as an illustration of the multivalent nature of the work.

Glocal English compares the usage patterns and stylistic conventions of the world’s two dominant native varieties of English (British and American English) with Nigerian English, which ranks as the English world’s fastest-growing non-native variety courtesy of the unrelenting ubiquity of the Nigerian (English-language) movie industry in Africa and the Black Atlantic Diaspora. Using contemporary examples from the mass media and the author’s rich experiential data, the book isolates the peculiar structural, grammatical, and stylistic characteristics of Nigerian English and shows its similarities as well as its often humorous differences with British and American English. Although Nigerian English forms the backdrop of the book, it will benefit teachers of English as a second or foreign language across the world. Similarly, because it presents complex grammatical concepts in a lucid, personal narrative style, it is useful both to a general and a specialist audience, including people who study anthropology and globalization. The true-life experiential encounters that the book uses to instantiate the differences and similarities between Nigerian English and native varieties of English will make it valuable as an empirical data mine for disciplines that investigate the movement and diffusion of linguistic codes across the bounds of nations and states in the age of globalization.

In this thesis, I researched in what ways the black oral tradition appears in literature. In order to reach to a conclusion, literary works of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were scrutinized. According to historians Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Houston Baker Jr., these two authors in particularly are important, because they formally experimented with one of the most expressive artistic forms in African-American culture, the blues. For this reason, special attention was given to evaluating in what ways African-American oral tradition appears in traditional blues lyrics, and in the performance of this music.

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Scholars of AAVE have typically assumed that the invariant am typical of minstrel depictions of black speech was a fabrication, used neither by modern nor earlier black Americans. However, the frequency with which invariant am occurs in transcriptions of ex-slave speech has always lent a certain uncertainty here, despite claims that these must have been distortions introduced by the transcribers. I argue that the use of invariant am in a great many literary sources written by black writers with sober intention, grammatical descriptions of black speech which note invariant am as a feature, and the use of invariant am in regional British dialects imported to the New World suggest that invariant am was a now extinct form in earlier AAVE, largely eclipsed by World War II but once common among black slaves and their immediate descendants. What have been interpreted in some second-pass edits of interview transcriptions as corrections of mistaken hearings of invariant am (Maynor 1988) were actually, I argue, prescriptive maskings of invariant am tokens actually uttered by the interviewees.

Language and power have been interlinked and are noticeable in the form of presence of languages like English, French and Spanish in different countries around the world due to rules of British, French and Spanish colonies. The colonial empires made systematic attempts for linguistic and cultural colonization as well making people believe that the language of colonial rulers was superior to their local languages. The spread of English around the globe today had its roots in the colonial empire of British. Through the power, which these rulers enjoyed, they established the hegemony of their language. And in the present day, the economic and military powers of these hegemonic powers are also serving as the tools to establish their linguistic hegemony. With this background, the present paper seeks to review how hegemony of power, which Britain and America enjoyed and enjoy, is correlational with the hegemony of English language spread and use around the globe.

Increasingly, studies of African American English (AAE) include in their scope the speech of upper and middle-class African Americans (Rahman 2008; Weldon 2011; Alim and Smitherman 2012; Weldon and Britt forthcoming), rather than focusing on the working class males historically privileged as the most authentic speakers of the variety (Labov 1966, 1972; Fasold 1972). Relatively little scholarship, however, has focused on the speech of African Americans in a heavily class-mixing environment.
This project takes a mixed-methods approach to examining the ways in which professional class speakers in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, D.C. use African American English in identity construction. It undertakes the study of one phonological variable, final consonant devoicing (FCD), and additionally studies quantitatively and qualitatively those speakers’ use of morphosyntactic features of AAE.
The statistical results for FCD are consistent with other findings: individual speaker variation accounts for the majority of the data. The intraspeaker patterning of FCD, however, suggests that professional class African Americans orient to an iconized idea of devoicing as precise pronunciation, allowing them to recruit a second-order indexical meaning (Silverstein 2003) of “correctness,” which they then use to enact the identity of “professional class.”
The further examination of morphosyntactic variation reveals that the ways the speakers use AAE in specific stancetaking about the race, class, and and gentrification suggests that for these speakers, the use of an ethnoracially marked dialect is a means of affirming the positive affiliation with the predominantly African American neighborhood. This strategic employment of AAE features as part of their ethnolinguistic repertoires (Benor 2010), allows the speakers in this study to merge identities of African Americanness with professionalness in a way that helps stake their claim as longtime residents of a community that is rapidly changing.
This dissertation makes contributions to the field of African American Language study in its use of mixed quantitative and qualitative technique, and its examination of an understudied region and an understudied African American population. Further, it finds that the social meanings of features of an ethnolinguistic repertoire are not always the same, nor do they necessarily stem from group-associational meanings. Rather, languaging in interaction means drawing on the multiple indexical meanings of any given variable in order to construct multiple—and at times, conflicting—identities of race, place, and class.

The article aims to shed some light on the role of language during a crucial step of life when it comes to identity, that is to say youth – the age of uncertainty par excellence, in which every convention, every belief is put into question and re-elaborated. The analysis focuses on the teenagers of the British Indian diasporic community, for whom the research of an identity also includes the definition of belonging. The issue is tackled by reading Gautam Malkani’s debut novel, Londonstani (2006). The amazing ability of Malkani is to disclose how the issue of identity is played into language – each unanswered question, each attempt to find a definition (both failed and successful), to establish or break bonds of belonging, to disobey institutions and to adapt to the rules of a subgroup. That is the reason why the present work focuses on language, trying to reveal how it can simultaneously reflect and determine belonging in itself, thus becoming more than just a tool to communicate: the means becomes the message, transcending its content.

We ilustrate the complexity and interest of English phonology and morphology through two case studies: the phonological and morphological behavior of sibilant suffixes, and the aspiration of voiceless obstruents. We focus on documenting individual variation in these areas and examining theoretical proposals that have been advanced to account for the attested range of variation that is found, highlighting cases where the data connect to larger issues in phonological and morphological theory.

No matter what approach individuals take, language often plays a role in how they represent their identity. Black Jews may make selective use of elements of the distinctive linguistic repertoires associated with African Americans and with Jewish Americans, known as African American English (AAE) and Jewish English (JE), respectively. This chapter analyzes one type of communication among Black Jews: self-conscious presentations of their combined Black-Jewish identities in videos available online.

This article explores the ways in which 'gangsta' English features are deployed, evaluated and adopted in two types of social media, the web forum and Twitter, within the domains of hip hop culture and football (soccer) culture, from the dual perspective of authenticity and normativity. Empirically, we aim to break new ground by investigating the intricate interconnections between two social media formats and combining two highly popular but previously seldom connected cultural forms-football and hip hop. Our theoretical aim is to contribute to the current debate on authenticity, normativity, popular culture and social media, and the complex ways in which they are connected. We focus, first, on the Twitter writing of the Finnish footballer Mikael Forssell, specifically his uses of non-Standard English and references to hip hop culture and rap music, and second, on the ways in which Forssell's stylized writing elicits normatively oriented metapragmatic commentaries, i.e., meta-level discussion, on a major Finnish football discussion forum. Of particular interest here is the emically emerging category of 'gangsta' English and its perceived (in)authenticity-when used by Forssell and two other ('White') middle-class Finnish footballers. Drawing on the frameworks of authenticity and sociolinguistic superdiversity, we foreground the tension between purist normativity and playful appropriation online. Our discussion highlights the unpredictability of the connections between language use, (popular) cultural forms, ethnicity, country of origin, and the complexity of mediation across online and offline sites of social action.

The Nigerian Civil War has been affirmed in extant scholarly quarters the singular event which has elicited the most robust literary harvest in the entire African literary imagination. Poetry, the most cryptic and the most elevated of the genres of literature is a ready tool in moments of urgent literary activism such as war. Quite a few Nigerian writers, therefore, took recourse to poetry in the bid to delineate war experience. This research critically engages the war poetry of T. C. Nwosu and Akomaye Oko, two avant-garde poets who have received little critical attention unlike their counterparts in the same vein. The study uncovers how the poets war with their soul in moments of dire circumstances and anguish to thresh out philosophic harvests through their ruminations on the war. With the agency of qualitative analysis, the research underpins the duality of all phenomena, particularly war as ingrained in the poems. The inquiry suggests that though war is to be cauterized, terrible beauty may be distilled from the same. This is manifest in perseverance, inventiveness, robust effusions, and the mind's education all of which result from war.

This article discusses the earliest attestations and history of various English indefinite hyperbolic numerals such as zillion, jillion, and umpteen, identifying them as a previously unrecognized category of contemporary English words with a peculiarly American emphasis. Umpteen originated in the late 1870s but became normative in the Midwest in the 1890s, not as World War I British soldiers' cant as frequently claimed. Zillion first flourished in African American English in the 1920s, while jillion originated independently in Texas around the same time. These ought to be regarded as a contemporaneous cluster of locally developed words within specific discourse communities rather than random nonce inventions. Since 1985 a massive expansion has occurred in the lexicon, primarily using the emphatic prefixes ka-, ba-, and ga-. Interviews conducted with African American youth in 2009–10 suggest that zillion may be acquiring a fixed numeral meaning (following trillion) among some speakers. Indefinite hyperbolic numerals represent a lexical category newly, promiscuously, and playfully developed in late nineteenth-and twentieth-century Englishes, in a discursive environment where numerical reference had become normative.