Types of bitches

I was just directed to a hilarious post over at 'And I am Not Lying', called 'Types of Bitches', about a list written by third graders at an inner-city Washington DC school, detailing almost 100 types of bitches.

I'm blown away by the ingenuity of whoever wrote this. No way I could come up with that many types of bitches (or most things, for that matter) if I needed to. Clearly, these are kids who are absorbing a ton of language, and remembering it and recombining it at an impressive rate. I think we rarely see written examples of that.

But the real linguistic gem is the blogger's subsequent post, analyzing the comments people (presumably mostly adult, educated people) left on the original post. The blogger and some of the commenters he quotes really seem to get that a language prejudice issue arose out of this.

Stop being so judgemental. Damning her, her values, her upbringing, her likely future is ridiculous. She might be a “reflection of our future” but these are just a few sheets of paper not a manifesto or a clear indicator of a life rife with turmoil.

This is language practice -- a big part of what kids do with words is categorize, recombine -- test it out. It might tell us something about what the author hears a lot, but I don't think it tells us too much else about her. Certainly not that the "kid has issues", as one commenter put it. These are probably really powerful words in this kid's community -- words that let people exclude each other and seem better than each other, for example. What kid wouldn't want to play with that?