Word: vernacular
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...just got tweed-suited postcolonial theorists gnawing at their pencils. In the fifth installment of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures this Monday, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk waxed troubled before a packed audience in Sanders Theatre. The American writer, he said, has the luxury of dabbling in regionalist vernacular (a hat tip to his beloved Faulkner); in contrast, the Turkish novelist is doomed to make a “museum” of his fiction, preserving his culture and displaying it to Europe by packing in as many observations as he can. Rather than being a thing of beauty...
...plight of the Israelites resonated with the earliest American settlers. For centuries, the Catholic Church had banned the direct reading of Scripture. But the Protestant Reformation, combined with the printing press, brought vernacular Bibles to everyday readers. What Protestants discovered was a narrative that reminded them of their sense of subjugation by the church and appealed to their dreams of a Utopian New World. The Pilgrims stressed this aspect of Moses. When the band of Protestant breakaways left England in 1620, they described themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. On the Atlantic, they proclaimed their journey...
...channel it convincingly. Palin's singular rhetorical style is a boon on that score. "The fun part is when you get to the point that they don't even notice it wasn't something they actually said," says Jenkins. "Sarah Palin, in her own odd vernacular, is incredibly sort of quotable and eloquent, in her own Palinesque...
...Expos teaches many odd formulations that you will never again encounter in real life. Rather than resist the Expos vernacular, learn it and use it in your Expos essays. And then after the class, use what you like and disregard the rest...
...would have left Gates and his huffy comments alone once he was sure Gates was the homeowner. He admits he may well have been offended by the professor's alleged bluster, but that's just part of the job, so much so that there's a term in police vernacular devoted to situations like this: contempt...