KOOL A.D'S "HOW TO PAY FOR A BABY"

Kool A.D's, "How to Pay for a Baby" is an enthralling insight into how social and regional dialects can cause assumptions on a person’s culture. Within the first few lines, it is evident that in the article the author uses quite informal language. For example, there are multiple contractions (i.e.: “Ya’ll”, for you and all) as well as occasional profanity, in which demonstrates to the audience that with this slang the author reveals to us of the social class he had been raised in; which, in this case, is that of the lower class as school tends to try and sculpt the student’s speech by the time they graduate. As, diction of this kind when writing a professional piece to console struggling families is (for the most part) almost always likely to take the traditional route of writing in a formal manner. Furthermore, as Kool A.D shares with the audience his political views (i.e. “weak a** country”) one may also make  a comment that, by the governmental injustice in the region of the world he claims to have grown up in, this could have also been a cause for his informal language. This social dialect was most likely recycled from the language of which his family had used, which brings a discussion of whether it is family or an exterior environment that affects the way in which Kool A.D speaks. To elaborate, most people when speaking about a topic they are passionate about, a lot of their deep-rooted heritage comes out in the form of a unique style (i.e. "she stay shredding on that" instead of the standard English, "she played it a lot") that their culture had developed through time (i.e. a baby will f*** with that thing heavy). Not to mention that, with the overall method, Kool A.D’s idiolect also allows the reader to design the master identity of the writer based on his piece of writing. Personally, the text paints an image in my mind that Kool A.D is a middle-lower class colored male, who most likely was raised in an urban community where this form of speaking is exchanged casually and without question. Of course, all judgment holds some fault to them, as one cannot simply hear someone and be able to correctly predict their lifestyle, intelligence, sexuality, and so on. Knowing this, a question is asked whether influences such as popular media should allow humans to categorize information about a person based on barely any details, as people tend to want to save time by being cognitive misers––thus, explaining how stereotypes are formed. Centering back to the text, it is obvious that language overlaps with the article’s meaning/context as, based on the reader, a small amount of judgment is cushioned at the back of their brains as it is read. Why? Generalizations of a culture are articulated throughout the text (i.e. advice being to rob a bank, or becoming a professional gambler, of which are typical cliché’s for the African-American community). Therefore, with just Kool A.D’s lingo, he unintentionally offers the audience a clear insight into his world through the disguise of an advice article of how to take care of a baby financially.