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Comment by throwanem | Hacker News Reader

Good grief. Quote Dre up top, then totally ignore AAVE and Southern American English which both heavily feature the construction of interest, despite being interested to find out what the Boer pidgin, of all things, has to say. (Why not Basque next? That would be about as relevant!) This they call a linguistic diversity project? Surely they could not have found themselves short of sources!

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AAVE is definitely underappreciated as the source of a lot of common modern slang. But in this case, the article makes it pretty clear that "try and" is not nearly modern enough to have come from AAVE - they show several attestations from the 1500s and even mention one from 1390.

If they had headed the first section differently, I would credit this argument. Under the name "Who says this?" as at present it bears, and with nothing there or elsewhere to justify the substantial and obvious exclusion, that section is substantially incomplete.

edit: But so is your own criticism, in that it ignores AAVE is not the only dialect I mentioned. It isn't even one I would say I really speak, except inasmuch as AAVE and my own SAE heavily overlap as the close siblings they are. Both deserve to be treated, not least for that interrelationship, as well as the one you mention with their forcible deracination into mesolect and acrolect slang, where the class origin makes such terms feel "edgy."

And also ignoring British English (and probably other international Englishes too); writing ‘try put’, ‘go put’ or ‘go see’ for example would get a red mark and a correction from the teacher in the UK.

*'Try put' is also incorrect in American English, as discussed in the article. It isn't incorrect in my view, just hampered by its authors' lack of diligence.

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