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Oh, that would be John McWhorter over there. How are you, John?

Hi, Glenn. How are you? I don't know, man. I've been better, but there's no point in complaining.

Anybody who's listening to this needs to know that this is the Glenn Show. I'm Glenn Lary. I teach at Brown University, and I'm talking to my bi-weekly conversation partner, John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University.

John also writes a regular column for the New York Times.

Congratulations, John, on your most recent column at the New York Times, where you talk about Black English and all of that.

Oh, yeah, the James one.

Yeah.

I enjoyed writing them.

Must have thrown you back to your youth when that issue of Ibonics was raging 25 or 30 years ago.

Yeah, that was what got me started on media commentary,

although I didn't know that that was what was going on.

I just wanted to say my say about the dialect.

And one of the things that I remember hearing so often back then since

is there's an idea that Black English was created as a kind of secret code.

And it's just something that, you know, it's appealing, the idea that we proactively created something in order not to be heard by the white man.

That's often said about Creole languages, too.

And it's an understandable layman's idea that gets around.

There's no actual evidence of that, but it's just that it's a clever guess.

And I think that the way Everett has the slaves deliberately teaching each other this way to talk because whites like black people to talk that way.

It's very clever and I really enjoyed the book, but I worried that it might encourage that myth.

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