Notes on vernacular language

Vernacular 

Has momentum

Has energy

Vernacular throws off the rational

Standard language, leveled dialect, is safer

Vernacular can be threatening

Threatening to the social order

So we “need” (are required) to think of the vernacular speaker as stupid, inferior

Standard language is not merely neutral, in the positive sense, a medium to build understanding

When it’s enforced, standard

becomes neutering and neutralizing

I made these notes after reading a great story written in a UK vernacular. It struck me that the story could be retold in a southern U.S. dialect and it would remain very similar. But if it were recast in standard UK or U.S. English, it would lose all its drive and complexity. It would be limp.

In a 2014 interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard, critic James Wood asked, after talking about Knausgaard writing about shitting in the woods as a kid, “Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like ‘yuck,’ ‘phew,’ ‘oh oh oh,’ ‘ha ha ha’—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?”

Wood’s assertion of the existence of high language in high fiction, something it seems to me normally goes unmentioned, caught me. Maybe all my years of working with juvenile books and genre fiction have shaped my expectations. But I don’t understand why any storytelling, high, middle, or low, would look to omit how people talk and think. How strange.

I encountered a similar notion in Jay Jennings’s introduction to Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany. “Behold the lowly but upright exclamation point!” writes Jennings. “Cormac McCarthy recently declared that it has no place in literature (ditto the semicolon), but Portis’s expertise argues for its retention.” First of all, the proposition that exclamation points don’t belong in literature—high literature, no doubt—is completely ridiculous. Just because McCarthy doesn’t wnt to use them gives him no right to stigmatize them in general. Second, Jennings is so right to discuss Portis’s genius with exclamation points. My favorite passage in his 1979 roadtrip novel Dog of the South just wouldn’t be the same without them:

The guidebook advised against driving at night in Mexico but I figured that stuff was written for fools. I was leaning forward again and going at a headlong pace like an ant running home with something. The guidebook was right. It was a nightmare. Trucks with no tailights! Cows and donkeys and bicyclists in the middle of the road! A stalled bus on the crest of a hill! A pile of rocks coming up fast! An overturned truck and ten thousand oranges rolling down the road! I was trying to deal with all this and watch for Sky at the same time and I was furious at Dr. Symes for sleeping through it. I no longer cared whether he fell out or not.

An incredibly paced list, gaining momentum with a series of exclamations! I love it. But setting aside the brilliance of that passage, don’t people exclaim? Don’t they show excitement, and feel it, and think it? They do. The exclamation point belongs in fiction. Everything that belongs to humanity belongs in. Otherwise, what are writers trying to accomplish?