It's the night before Christmas
and here in our house,
It ain't nothing moving,
not even no mouse.
There go we-all stockings,
hanging high up off the floor,
So Santa Claus can full them up,
if he walk in through our door.
Just for the fun of it, William A. Stewart had translated Clement Moore's famous poem into a loose imitation of ghetto language as a Christmas greeting from the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. By chance, a twelve-year-old Negro girl with a serious reading problem picked up the parody in Stewart's presence. To his...