Jargon grows and communication is retarded when a learned vocabulary becomes more important for its social than its communicative functions. Teachers often severely correct the culturally deprived speaker of nonstandard English, whereas their first concern should be what is communicated, not how it is communicated. We are, after all, teaching communication, and must suppress our obsession with grammar before it destroys the open atmosphere which encourages the ability to learn any dialect, including the standard dialect. We should work to nurture in students a sensitivity to the "metamessages" in communications--the subtleties of tone and implication growing out of connotative meaning, figurative language, intonation, and emphasis. Thus, we impart to them a better control and awareness of their language, enabling them to write and speak in a manner which mirrors, in its cadences and other devices of sound, the "movement" of ideas, the shape of an argument, and the activity of the mind. (DL)