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May 31, 2025 - Lionel Nation
08:15
Linguistics Uncovered: The Truth About 'Ax' in Black Vernacular
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Time Text
How many times have you heard somebody say, you know, what's with these black folks who keep using the word ax?
You know, it's ax!
I'm going to ax you a question.
I'm going to ax you.
Lizzie Borden took an ax.
Gave her mama 40 whacks.
John F. Kennedy didn't say, ax not!
Right?
This is what you hear all the time.
You think, oh, it's ridiculous.
It's some kind of submental, illiterate, uneducated, Well, guess what?
There are roots to it.
It's older than ask.
It goes back to Chaucer and Shakespeare.
They're correct!
They're correct!
Do you understand this?
No, you don't.
Sometimes you think things are one way, but they're not.
You see, the confusion, this confusion between Acts...
And ask is one of the most compelling, fascinating examples of how language evolves through time and through power and culture and race and class and all this other stuff.
And far from being a modern mispronunciation, or as my friend says, mispronunciation, which is kind of funny if you think about it.
Anyway, the form acts actually Predates ask by centuries.
In Old English, around 1000 AD or CE, depending upon where you're from, the verb appeared as axian.
A-C-S-I-A-N.
Or A-X-I-A-N.
And it was used interchangeably to mean to ask.
Now, over the years, Listen carefully.
Regional dialects across Britain and the UK and everything evolved with acts becoming widely used among the working class and in rural speech, especially in southern England.
Now, this is a fact.
Literary giants like Chaucer and Shakespeare used acts, A-X-E, in their words, demonstrating Demonstrating its legitimacy.
Shakespeare!
And as English settlers migrated to America, they brought their regional speech patterns with them.
Now, in the American South, and this is important, this is where a lot of this interesting stuff comes from and was percolated and fermented and fomented.
In the American South, where many English speakers settled, the axe form persisted.
Enslaved Africans learned English from these speakers, not from formal instructions, embedding acts into what would become African American Vernacular English, AAVE, but learned from British white folks.
AAVE is often misunderstood and unfairly stigmatized.
It's called Ebonics.
It's not Ebonics.
It's not ghetto.
Sometimes people will slam Jasmine Crockett for whatever reason it should be.
But her speech, one time she goes, child, I've never seen that kind of thing.
And they say, oh, it's uneducated.
No, that's a style.
But it's also a fully developed dialect with its own consistent grammar and pronunciation and rules.
Acts is just one example.
Other commonly maligned, Double negatives, which function as emphatic announcements and reinforcements, as they do in Spanish and French.
Finna, I'm finna go, I'm finna pay the man, I'm finna, or fixin to.
This is as valid future tense constructions.
And the habitual be as he be working, which denotes consistent or repeated action rather than something happening right now.
All of these features, all of these examples are logical, rule-based, and linguistically sound.
Even acts!
is an example of a metathesis.
A metathesis, a sound reversal that's common in English evolution.
English itself is full of such examples.
Bird used to be brid, and third, as in number three, was once thrid.
And the reason ask became dominant was not because it was better or more correct.
It was because elites...
Look, like, irregardless.
My favorite, irregarding.
It's considered legitimate but not preferred.
And often, along with classist and racist lines, is this concatenation of the two.
And as a result, acts.
Became associated with black speech and ignorance, despite its deeper historical roots.
Linguists today recognize this is a case where social bias, not linguistic merit, determined what was considered proper.
So when someone says acts, they're not butchering the language.
They're speaking a form of English that's been in use for a thousand years, passed down, preserved, and enriched.
Through oral tradition, ladies and gentlemen, resistance and culture.
Language is always evolving.
You know that.
It goes without saying.
And what's considered correct often says more about power than it does about grammar.
You see, understanding this doesn't just correct misconceptions.
It honors the real living history of our mother tongue.
Now, I know you didn't know this, and I know people are going to still resist this because there's something about it.
And I've seen that people say, oh, there he is.
As soon as you hear Acts, oh, there he goes!
I knew it!
Well, you didn't know it.
Now you know it.
Now you know it.
Because remember, the key to language, number one, is not speaking correctly, but being understood.
And there are many people I know who sometimes speak perfectly, grammatically correct, using terms that are...
I've heard people say things where I don't understand.
Eric Weinstein.
Nobody knows what he's saying.
And he confuses that with...
With genius.
His inability for people to understand what he's saying.
Does he see how smart I am?
No!
Because remember, remember, the number one goal is communication.
So let me axe you.
Let me axe you one more time.
Did you know this?
Of course not.
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Well, very simple.
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