And also, again somewhat off the subject, looky, looky looky! What have we here? Why, there's Alice Randall's 2001 controversial book "The Wind Done Gone" which proports to be "Gone with the Wind" from the perspective of the enslaved Black people.

http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-776

All this to say, I agree with the fact that you qualified your comment about whether [I suppose you meant] non-Black people saying "done gone" would be offensive to Black people. In my not at all humble opinion, as one Black person, whether "done gone" and other such phrases are offensive to Black Americans depends on context, context, context.

And as to whether we use it...well sometimes we put on the old school phrasing just because we wanna.

And sometimes not.

And who says Black folks are the only ones who use {or used} "done gone" to mean "fully left as opposed to being in the process of leaving"}. True, it may be an Africanism since traditional African languages have words that give a more detailed description of concepts of time. But isn't the general language-vocabulary and grammatical usages, and perhaps to a lesser extent pronunciation of poor & working class Southern African Americans, for instance, is very much the same as poor & working class Southern European Americans?

[That is not a rhetorical question. I truly am interested in your opinion on this].

Thanks. And btw, welcome to Mudcat!

Azizi



And sometimes not