Virginia Mixson Geraty

Virginia Mixson Geraty (1915–2004) was an American writer, librarian, and outspoken defender of the Gullah language. She authored poetry and books in the Gullah language and produced popular recordings in Gullah. She was also involved in theater and film productions that promoted popular understanding of the language.

Biography

The Gullah language is spoken by about 250,000 African Americans, called Gullahs, who live in the coastal region of South Carolina and Georgia. Gullah is a creole language that combines influences from English and African languages. Although the Gullah people and their language are now a focus of pride for African Americans, Gullah speech was long ridiculed as "ignorant" and "backward." Geraty came forward as a defender of Gullah in the 1950s when prejudice against the language was still extremely strong.

A white woman, Geraty spent some of her childhood years on Yonges Island, South Carolina. She learned Gullah from a family servant named "Maum Chrish," and she attributed her love of Gullah speech to those early interactions. Geraty worked for many years as a librarian in the Charleston County School System. Noticing that white teachers could not understand the speech of Gullah-speaking children, she spoke out in favor of language training for the teachers, but for many years her views were regarded as eccentric at best.

Geraty later produced a popular long-playing record with amusing anecdotes in Gullah. She wrote a Gullah-English dictionary, a Gullah cookbook, and a Gullah adaptation of the children's book The Night Before Christmas. She also wrote the script and served as the dialect coach for the award-winning film Gullah Tales in which the characters speak entirely in Gullah, and she served as a consultant to the BBC production The Story of English. Geraty translated the libretto of Porgy & Bess into Gullah and produced her version of the famous musical for audiences in Charleston. She also wrote a Christmas book dedicated to her Great grand children Luke and Anna.

Geraty was still active in her work to promote Gullah until shortly before her death at the age of 89. Even in advanced age, she was still controversial, sometimes telling Gullah young people that their Gullah speech was not correct because it was different from the old-fashioned Gullah she learned as a child. But Geraty had many warm friendships in the Gullah community, and in her later years, she often expressed joy at hearing Gullah spoken by small children. She devoted her life to preserving the language that she had learned as a child, and to gaining respect for it in the wider world.

Awards

In 1995, Geraty received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the College of Charleston in recognition of her efforts to preserve the Gullah language. In 1998, she received the South Carolina Governor's Award in the Humanities. Her other honors include the Pegasus Award from the South Carolina Poetry Society and the Outstanding Accomplishment Award from the National League of American Penwomen.

gollark: Fearsome.
gollark: I might have to release apioforms from the beecloud.
gollark: It must comfort you to think so.
gollark: > There is burgeoning interest in designing AI-basedsystems to assist humans in designing computing systems,including tools that automatically generate computer code.The most notable of these comes in the form of the first self-described ‘AI pair programmer’, GitHub Copilot, a languagemodel trained over open-source GitHub code. However, codeoften contains bugs—and so, given the vast quantity of unvettedcode that Copilot has processed, it is certain that the languagemodel will have learned from exploitable, buggy code. Thisraises concerns on the security of Copilot’s code contributions.In this work, we systematically investigate the prevalence andconditions that can cause GitHub Copilot to recommend insecurecode. To perform this analysis we prompt Copilot to generatecode in scenarios relevant to high-risk CWEs (e.g. those fromMITRE’s “Top 25” list). We explore Copilot’s performance onthree distinct code generation axes—examining how it performsgiven diversity of weaknesses, diversity of prompts, and diversityof domains. In total, we produce 89 different scenarios forCopilot to complete, producing 1,692 programs. Of these, wefound approximately 40 % to be vulnerable.Index Terms—Cybersecurity, AI, code generation, CWE
gollark: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.09293.pdf
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