On the social news site, Digg, someone with the alias “homerfink” posted a link to a story about Mr. T‘s return to television. The show is called “I Pity the Fool” and features the former A-Team and Rocky III star traveling the country giving Dr. Phil-like tough-love personal advice.
In their blurb, homerfink wrote:
Pity the fool who doesn’t digg this story.
The use of “doesn’t” is Standard English, not AAVE/Eubonics/Black English. The proper phrase should be:
Pity the fool who don’t digg this story.
It is a natural mistake, but it reminds us how hard it is to master the rules of a language you aren’t familiar with. The SE variant gets 14,400 hits on Google, while the grammatically correct AAVE variant gets only 9,700.
{AAVE, Black English, Eubonics, grammar, Linguistics, Mr. T}
