What's "ebonics"? What's an "end-man"?

Following up my first post of the morning, to save you checking with Wikipedia, here's what you need to know.

Ebonics (from the words "ebony" -- like the magazine -- and "phonics" -- like "old learning") is a term that was originally intended to refer to the language of all people descended from African slaves. Since 1996, Ebonics has primarily been used to refer to African American Vernacular English (AAVE), a dialect distinctively different from Standard American English.

AAVE is the politically correct term for what used to be called NNE, "Nonstandard Negro English". "Ebonics" was coined in 1973 by social psychologist Robert Williams, formerly a Negro but now an African-American. His intention was to give a name to the language of African-Americans that acknowledged the linguistic consequence of the slave trade and avoided the negative connotations of other terms.

With all respect to John McWhorter -- see previous post -- ebonics or AAVE or NNE or whatever you call it is non-standard English. God help the USA if public officials must talk "jive talk" to make themselves understood to the citizenry.

Speaking of jive talk... an end-man was a character in a black-and-white minstrel show, popular in the USA, Canada, and even in the UK in the 19th and 20th centuries. Blackface minstrelsy was the first distinctly American theatrical form. In the 1830s and 1840s, it was at the core of the rise of an American music industry, and for several decades it provided the lens through which white America saw black America. The Wikipedia article says: "On the one hand, it had strong racist aspects; on the other, it afforded white Americans a singular and broad awareness of significant aspects of black-American culture."


The end-men, in the picture, are the two performers sitting at the ends of the group. Traditionally they were Mr. Tambo (who played the tambourine) and Mr. Bones (you figure it out). They, and all the characters except Mr. Interlocutor (who was white) talked like Amos 'n' Andy.

I guess what they were speaking was "ebonics". If President Al aspires to reach that level, he needs more practice. If he'd been around 50 years ago, he could have joined a minstrel show. Sadly, minstrelsy, like Amos 'n' Andy, was killed in the 1960s, another victim of political correctness.