"Ax" for "Ask"?

       In writing lately about Yiddish words I know from childhood, I came upon John McWhorter's piece in the L.A. Times yesterday on the Black use of "ax" for "ask."

       Yes, it's different from chutzpah or mishegas in my recent posts, but not different in the way Blacks can hold "ax" close to them even when educated and "knowing better" just because it's "a facet of black being" as linguist McWhorter puts it.  If you grow up with a way of saying something that's characteristic of and indigenous to your people, and different from the mainstream's way of putting it, you treasure it in a personal way.   "Correct,"  "incorrect," or whether you can find it in a dictionary are not the question.

       A fuller treatment by the black Columbia University Prof can be located here.