From New York City, this is Lexicon Battley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater and this week you know what I'm going to do, frankly what I usually do,

which is just bring you in.

What was I thinking about over the past week or two?

And it was a bunch of things, but I happened to be revising an academic paper that I'm

writing.

And that paper happens to be about black English.

I don't usually do those, but I made an exception with this one because it's a topic that really

grabs me.

And you know, and deciding what to do the show about, I thought, you know, I'm going to do what?

I'm thinking about.

I don't want to do it about Kamala Harris or something like that.

I'm not sure what I could get out of that.

I want to do me.

And so, I'm going to share with you some stuff about the always fascinating dialect of American English,

black English.

It's called by academics, usually African American vernacular English, but I have a hard time

saying that, so we're just going to call it black English.

And we're going to look at it from various angles that I have been sitting around, laying

around still in semi quarantine these days.

And one of the things is going to be the lost am.

That's what my paper is about.

...