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“We create a speech community among our peers, and not across generations. So that generation that felt the slur will still feel it.”

“And yet it is the lexicon, it is the vocabulary that is the most imitated and celebrated — but not with the African American speech community being given credit for it.”

Linguists talk about the phenomenon of “accommodation”— which is the way in which we seek to adapt our own language to fit into a speech community.

What makes this a sensitive topic in education is that our most widely used allusions reflect the culture and history of the dominant "speech community."

On Monday, Calvert got an answer, but it wasn’t nearly what he or many others in the free speech community had hoped.