Wow. That escalated quickly.
How you are perceived is very strongly connected to how you speak. Simple as that, and it doesn't matter who the listener is.
If your cardiologist came in, chart in hand, and said, "we was lookin' at the results of your ECG and we has some concern about your mitral valve," and that doesn't scare the feces out of you, then I'm not sure what to tell you.
It would not make you a racist. It would make you a person who associates speaking ability with education.
Kevin Ollie regularly uses about 20 or fewer grammatically incorrect words/phrases/tenses. Perhaps it works on the recruiting trail, sitting in the kitchen. "We was" is the most glaring.
I'm surprised, however, that KO, as hard working as he is, has not taken the very little effort it would take to use standard English when speaking publicly. I don't know how it could be anything but good for his career.
I get the over-arching idea, but the way some people treat it leads me to believe they're racist and see him saying "we was" as a reason to call him an idiot. It's a cultural thing, and I wish it weren't and that everyone spoke correctly, I just think a basketball coach maybe is held to different standards than your cardiologist. Personally, I've heard people who I respected intellectually drop an "aks" into conversation which made me hear a record scratch. I agree overall that in the business world, in certain circles, one should speak "well" or "correctly" as it is generally understood.
That being said, how many times have you all heard people use worse/worst incorrectly? That also gives me a record scratch, in addition to "I could care less" which infuriates me because if you spend 5 seconds thinking about the words you're saying, you realize you mean to say you couldn't care less. The thing is, I don't think could care less is a cultural thing, its just flat out wrong logically. I have a white coworker who is bright in programming/CRM management, and he's from the south, and will say things like "I seen that", and it doesn't make me think less of him.
Dom Amore is a writer and usually has misspellings in his articles and tweets. That, is despicable, you're a writer... hire a personal editor if you need it to write correctly. He recently tweeted about the Arkansas game and what an embarrassment it was on many levels, and in said tweet he wrote "UCon"... to me, that was more embarrassing
