Academic exclusionism my ass Wikipedia purports to be an encyclopedia An encyclopedia primarily deals with the facts so far as they can be ascertained Until a few weeks ago this article was a messy mediocre but aside from routine minor racist vandalism fairly stable description of AAVE that didn t linger over the most ignorant points of view Along came an editor keen to align the article to his own ignorance quoting notable stupid comments Not surprisingly this attempt to turn one corner of an encyclopedia into a dictionary of received ideas was unpopular with other editors He applied for mediation an idea to which the others agreed I later regretted having done this You the mediator turned out to be pretty much a P cuchet to his Bouvard brushing aside the fruit of three decades of rigorous study against which there appears to be no objection other than soundbites by talking heads and commentators as a mere minority opinion Recently you seem to have moved away from this position and I m delighted to note the change But you need to go further Please understand this AAVE detractors are not merely ignorant of such lah di dah matters as IPA and phonological analysis they re ignorant of grammar and history They re ignorant of language as a whole They re too lazy to open a book read up on the subject and digest what they ve read Or as Cosby s career suggests that he is no fool they are feigning ignorance for commercial gain or some other payoff The article now specifies three critics One predates rigorous studies into AAVE and its ignorance about language is thus excusable One is some nincompoop called Govero utterly unnotable by any standard who seems to think that AAVE is akin to aphasia and or linguistic vandalism One is Cosby who equates a language with feces Tellingly both of the latter wring the same puny joke out of some imagined misunderstanding as axe of a metathetic version of ask They re all worthless each in a different way They can all be excluded or they can all be exposed for the ignoramuses that they are