Garrard McClendon, black professor and talk-show host, has titled a book Ax or Ask: The African American Guide to Better English. “What’s with aks?” someone regularly asks after a talk I give on language, with the audience dependably nodding and tittering. So, what is with it? The answer a linguist is supposed to give is that way back in Old English, the word for ask swung randomly between ascian and acsian. And this is true—black people didn’t simply take ask and change it. They received aks, which was a perfectly normal thing to happen to a word like ask. Fish was, believe it or not, a
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