Chapter 16 10/15

In this chapter, the ideas of Roger Abrahams, a folklorist, are discussed. In particular, he mentions the term regression, which he describes as momentarily returning to our childhood days. He uses this term when describing the language used by African American people in Philadelphia. The example used in the book is when an adult eats an ice cream cone, as it returns a person back to their youth when eating ice cream was very enjoyable. This theory also compares to Mikhail Bahktin’s idea of intertextuality, in which people use sources that have already been created to form and create new texts. Abrahams also discovered that young African Americans were very talented at creating rhymes and inserting them everywhere. There is a clear correlation between this rhyming/verbal dueling and rap music, in which rhymes are given music and set to music.