THE peace and good will of the Christmas season was disrupted by a noisy debate over how African Americans speak English. Or don't speak it. Ebonics, in other words.
Ebonics is a made up word combining "ebony" and "phonics". It's supposed to be the way the slaves in the South used to combine English words with their native African tongues, making their speech full of double and treble negatives, mismatched pronouns and using "be" instead of "am" and "is".
Examples are: "I ain't don' nothin'", "I be going home," "Him's in a wheelchair." Using "axed" instead of "asked" is also said to be Ebonics.
But opponents of the Ebonics theory say that many of these speech patterns have come down from the early English speaking settlers with their Shakespearean cadences and that there's no connection with African roots.
In Ireland there was a time when you would get a clip on the ear from the teacher for saying "I do be going home" or "I axed him". You did not think to console yourself that this was an Anglo Saxon form or an example of Elizabethan English brought over by settlers.
American as she is spoke is, of course, full of African origin words. "OK" is said to come from the West African word "wakey". Then there's voodoo, cola, banana, bubba, mumbo jumbo, zombie - all of African origin, it is claimed. The New York Times points out that Richard Nixon was speaking African American when he said "Right on".
The passions Ebonics arouses on both sides of the colour divide are echoing those following the acquittal of O.J. Simpson. While there is a university in Indiana which has a course on Ebonics, there is huge resistance, even among African Americans themselves, to the notion that the kind of slang they talk in their homes is a different language from English. "Talkin' coloured folks' talk" is how they would describe it, rather than Ebonics.
Outside the home, many blacks switch easily to "talkin' proper", but now a big number of the children find that they cannot and so are handicapped in looking for jobs.
The trouble began when the Oakland, California, school district voted on December 18th to recognise Ebonics as the "primary language" of many of Its pupils and as "genetically" distinct from English.
The problem for Oakland's teachers is that about three quarters of the black students in the area are ending up in special classes for the backward because of their inability to speak standard English, hence the school board's radical action.
The first garbled reports of the resolution to "recognise" Ebonics as a distinct language caused uproar. To the critics it seemed to be a pitch for federal funding such as is available to Spanish speaking children learning English and at the same time to demean black children by having them taught a kind of pidgin English.
That hero of African Americans, Rev Jesse Jackson, reacted angrily to the first reports that Oakland children were now going to be "taught" Ebonics, calling it "an unacceptable surrender" that "teaches down" to black children. The famous black poet Maya Angelou said she was "incensed".
There were also disapproving rumbles from Washington, where the Secretary of Education, Mr. Richard Riley, said that Ebonics was not a distinct language but a "dialect". There would be no federal funds available for teaching it, he said.
The Oakland school board, overwhelmed with calls, tried to dispel the confusion that its badly drafted resolution had stirred up. The board insisted it was not calling for the teaching of Ebonics but only for teachers to be taught how to handle it.
Thus, when their pupils spoke in their distinctive patois or slang, the teachers, instead of rebuking them for speaking "bad English", would "translate" their speech into standard English.
Mr Jackson had second thoughts when he met the school board to hear its explanation. Now he says that "they're not trying to teach black English as a standard language. They're looking for tools to teach children standard English so they might be competitive."
For the liberals, this was a disappointing row back by Mr Jackson from what they saw as his first courageous stand against Ebonics. Mary McGrory wrote in the Washington Post that "the idea of teaching Oakland teachers how to speak `black English' the better to help them teach the King's English is kooky even for California."
The columnist urged Mr Riley to mount performances of My Fair Lady for the Oakland children so they could see "a magnificent musical about the agony and ecstasy of learning English when it's your native language". The rain in Spain and all that.
Another liberal columnist, Richard Cohen, while sympathetic to black children handicapped by poor English, asks: "Can it really be possible that Oakland's teachers, many of them African American, cannot understand their African American students?"
Mr Cohen accuses the Oakland board of practising bureaucratic doublespeak - "Buronics".
How was it that song went? "You say Buronics, I say Ebonics", and so on. As for Elvis, he was singing in Ebonics when he crooned "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog". The double negative is the giveaway.
Some other examples of Ebonic speech are:
I done went to the store, girl I be, you be, he be, we be.
I ben don walk (meaning "I walked a long time ago")
My uncle be older than you.