Vernacular quotes:

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However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects. -- William Labov
This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. -- William Labov
Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. -- Joanna Russ
I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. -- David Antin
Second, we also got a more authentic liturgy of the people of God, in the vernacular language. -- Hans Kung
What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place. -- Calvin Trillin
Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.' -- Dave Chappelle
In 2009, I began creating 'Waterworks' with the new vernacular coming from the 'Signs of Life' work in Las Vegas. -- John Van Hamersveld
The word 'demand' is a tricky word when used by our gender. When used by men, it's part of their vernacular. -- Robin Wright
I removed 'cyberspace' from my vernacular. The idea, which I grew up with, of going into a place separate from the real world, is something my students just don't recognise. -- Clay Shirky
The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions. -- Michael Tilson Thomas
I'm very confident that Nick Hornby always gets it right as a writer. He has the vernacular and passion. He is adroit and dry, and balances humor with the humanity of life. -- Pierce Brosnan
I wanted to get away from the Mexican vernacular and do more 'nuevo Latino.' Americans are starting to understand regionality in Mexican food. It is very regional in terms of ingredients. -- Aaron Sanchez
I guess maybe I try to make movies that are closer to real life than are many Hollywood movies. But I still try to stay within a commercial narrative, a contemporary American vernacular. -- Alexander Payne
What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds. -- Carlisle Floyd
'Friends' was an education in intelligent comedic banter; in intelligent vernacular. It was an education in scene study. It was an education in group dynamic. I came out of there with a master's degree in comedy. -- Matt LeBlanc
We want a vernacular in art. No mere verbal or formal agreement, or dead level of uniformity but that comprehensive and harmonizing unity with individual variety which can be developed among people politically and socially free. -- Walter Crane
Baseball players practice, runners practice, so how can you practice being funny? You get up onstage. You train as an improviser, playing make-believe, using the vernacular of improvisation, saying 'yes and' to other people's ideas, making statements. -- Ali Farahnakian
Diminutive worlds are more likely to be rocky, and lapped by oceans and atmospheres. In the vernacular of 'Star Trek,' these would be M-class planets: life-friendly oases where biology could begin and bumpy-faced Klingons might exist. -- Seth Shostak
Architectural kitsch is most common in the commercial pop vernacular - typified by the Big Duck of 1931 in Flanders, New York, a Long Island roadside poultry stand resembling a duck, which Venturi and Scott Brown made a cult object through their writings. -- Martin Filler
Melodies are just honest. They can only be what they are. Words have the capacity for deception. They're all full of subtext, and some of them are cliche and overused and vernacular. They're tricky. All I can say is, words are tricky. -- Andrew Bird
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population. -- Thomas B. Macaulay
I don't know the rules of grammar... If you're trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. -- David Ogilvy
Jazz music, as is also the case with the old down-home spirituals, gospel and jubilee songs, jumps, shouts and moans, is essentially an American vernacular or idiomatic modification of musical conventions imported from Europe, beginning back during the time of the early settlers of the original colonies. -- Albert Murray
I'm not saying that there weren't other inherent problems with the score that couldn't have been overcome with a bit of remixing, but why did they ask me to do it, and why did Griffin ask me to do it this way, for a film that had nothing to do with American vernacular? -- Michael Nyman
While there are many experts in the psychoanalysis of individuals, there seems to be little active authority or understanding in the matter of the persistent shared madness in everyday life. It's as if collective mental illness doesn't exist except in the vernacular and in contemporary folk myth, where it remains trapped and politically useless. -- Michael Leunig
In the vernacular of my grandfather, 'I does not care.' -- Herman Cain
Oh, this I have to see. I love it when you go for the vernacular. Jugular. -- Sherrilyn Kenyon
Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy. -- John Adams
I'm motivated by injustice, which is embedded and constant and wrong - not by a vernacular soundboard. -- Amy Richards
I've always been obsessed with electronics and using computers and software. It's always been part of my vernacular. -- Sufjan Stevens
Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular. -- Gautama Buddha
I do know that for all the artists it's very important to speak in a vernacular that can be understood by everyone. -- Aaron Rose
You know what the left has succeeded in doing, they have succeeded, in terms of the vernacular, the lexicon, they've redefined the word "immigration" and to tell everyone we're anti-immigrant. -- Rush Limbaugh
You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news. -- Adlai E. Stevenson
The racial categories that are used in a given society (for example, in contemporary America) are biologically meaningless, but sometimes it turns out that a vernacular racial category has biological reality. -- Elliott Sober
When I write lyrics, I really do go into an automatic folk appropriation mode. I see the vernacular register of 20th century song as being a bunch of forms to adapt and reconfigure. -- Jonathan Lethem
The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is gospel centered and in the vernacular. -- Timothy Keller
The disquieting thing about newscaster-babble or editorial-speak is its ready availability as a serf idiom, a vernacular of deference. "Mr. Secretary, are we any nearer to bringing about a dialogue in this process ? -- Christopher Hitchens
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I still prefer to hear [Bob] Dylan acoustic, some of his electric songs are absolutely great. Electric music is the vernacular of the second half of the twentieth century, to use my father's old term. -- Pete Seeger
If we had written Tristan in the true vernacular the audience would have been very small. It wouldn't have even been Shakespearean. It would have been so Celtic you wouldn't understand what was going on. -- Ridley Scott

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