In Praise of the Vernacular
Writing about Ross Gay in the style of Ross Gay
This morning I finished Ross Gay’s Book of Delights. (I’m prolonging my Gay-jag by ordering up his other books from the library.) The Book of Delights is a small book, coat-pocket-sized, a selection of the essayettes2 Gay wrote every day for a year, beginning and ending on his birthday. I’m always on the lookout for other people undertaking daily projects; my daily drawings project also started and ended on my own birthday— my personal New Year’s Day.
Since he wrote these essayettes in a day, they’re bite-sized, just a page or three. The last few were about black bumblebees; beating some kids at two-up basketball; sucking honeysuckles;3 and oiling himself with coconut oil after a (bath? shower? he doesn’t say, only that he was still half-wet). In the hands of a lesser poet, a project like this could read like someone’s gratitude journal, which it kind of is, but I think what redeems it is Gay’s rigorous honesty about himself. He writes, for instance, about waking up from a dream wherein he realised he had been fucking his Mother for two years (the delight in that case was waking up and realising it was only a dream); and— in real life— pissing his pants in the car, the delight being relief from suffering. (Nor is it the only piss-themed delight. There’s another one about pissing in a Gatorade bottle to make pee tea for his plants,4 and then his teenage stepdaughter coming along and asking if she can have some, and him having to snatch it gently out of her hand before it reaches her lips, which, awkward.)
Anyway, as I finished the book, I started thinking about Americans and the way they use language. For instance, Gay uses a lot of colloquialisms that I think are his own variations, like jenky to mean crappy or improvisationally fixed (I would spell it janky). Or how he always spells accoutrement accouterment. He’s also fond of coining neologisms like flummoxment, psycho-doofusness, etc.; or negreet, which is when another Black person says hi to you and / or touches you, say in a not-very-Black space. The true pleasure of his sentences, though, for me, the reader, is the word-juxtaposition— which one would expect from a poet, a word-lover5 on the grass-level sense, laying down in the thicket of words, I mean, looking at them close up and from underneath. There’s a particular pleasure, as a reader, from being constantly surprised in a good way. Another big charm-component of this book is in its digressiveness— improvised short-form rambles, yes, but as I know from drawing, casual simplicity in the moment is a deceptively difficult form: it only LOOKS simple. Improvised elegance is the fruit of labour.
Back to American speech. Ursula K. Le Guin, probably my all-time favourite writer, is also an American, a Californian by origin, and her writing voice doesn’t sound American to me: she writes in a kind of universal, non-culturally-specific language which I guess is necessary when you’re trying to pretend you’re on other planets etc. (In fact, like many great geniuses of sci-fi, she often invents new languages from whole cloth, sometimes just for a single short story.)
Anyway, the reason I was thinking about all of this was that over the last few years I’ve noticed this weird phenomenon: te kidz, by which I mean the yoot, the young folk, use Americanisms by default, without even thinking about it. (I’d say this applies to people up to about the age of 30, even.) For instance, the word store has overtaken the word shop; cookie replaces biscuit; sweater for jumper; hike instead of tramp; even things like bangs meaning fringe or diaper meaning nappies. Candy / lollies. etc. etc.6
The thing is, as I mentioned, the kids themselves don’t notice, nor do their friends. It’s a shifting baseline syndrome variant. That’s just the language they use: they don’t think twice about it, and it’s only a Hinge-dweller7 like me who experiences a time-tweak upon hearing such words. I think it upsets me because it’s cultural hegemony, disseminated by way of Internet TV. If babies learn to talk by watching the Internet, they will imprint like ducklings onto an American accent— and, indeed, this too I have heard about town, spoken without self-consciousness.
This can make me irrationally angry, which is ironic given that my ‘culture’ (such as it is) is itself a colonising culture; ‘New Zealand English’ is a baby-language, a few hundred years old, if that. When I think about the language of my childhood that has become old-fashioned overnight, swept away in a river of Coca-Cola, Hollywood,8 McDonalds, Disney Americanism— and this is not the true Americanism, the true vernacular of America is multifarious, mutant, creative, as evidenced by Ross Gay, what I’m talking about here is language as commerce, language as product, language as tool of Imperialism— what I think about is how much of my language came from my Mum (that’s why they call it a mother-tongue), who grew up in the country, so inherited a certain rural, common flavour of NZ English, and her Mum, who also grew up in the country; so actually it’s the distaff line I’m talking about here, that generally insulted side of the family. Insulted by way of being born female in the 1920s and 1940s respectively and taking the hits of that, I mean. (Ross Gay’s Mother is a farmer’s daughter, which maybe explains some of the flavour of his verbal flourish. too.)
Anyway, as I was putting my pants on I had a Gay-induced revelation, that this anger is just love sublimated. That, yeah, hearing kids talk American makes me mad, but that’s because I love the endangered language, the old Kiwiana. Like Ross Gay, I love the vernacular, the humour and specificity of it, the way we say Yeah nah for instance, which is an interjection that doesn’t mean yes or no, nor does it really mean both at once, but it is kind of an affirmation or agreement anyway, it’s a verbal punctuation mark like a comma, to keep the talk rolling; or sweet as— sweet as what? Nothing. Just all good, sweet as. (What do you call an owl with one leg shorter than the other? Not even, owl!) These are modern, though, they’re modern slang, which is not quite what I’m getting at. It’s hard to think of vintage sayings off the cuff. Kev says that sayings arise in response to stimulus.9 That makes them seem like a reservoir of folk wisdom stored in memory, rising to the tongue as needed, which is not far from the truth.
Maybe, too, I’m attuned to old-time language because of folk singing. Definitely that’s one of the major reasons I love folk songs: I love the language of which they’re made. As I roved out on a bright May morning.10
All this makes me think of Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks,11 a compilation of land-words from across the British Isles— words that describe natural phenomena specific to place. (I tested it out on Kev by reading the Sussex words aloud and asking him what they meant, and his definitions lined up with Macfarlane’s, which made me trust the book’s veracity.) The framing of Landmarks is that language and land are knitted together, and when the language we use to speak about the land becomes endangered, so do whole ways of understanding. (An argument familiar to anyone who studies an indigenous language.) It’s not small bikkies: how we speak is how we think. Language homogenisation is cultural impoverishment.
Writers care about language more than your average Josephine. The difference between one word and another tunes a sentence, makes it a different instrument, even. Choosing a word feels like that folk wisdom thing I was describing a few paragraphs back, the way a saying rises to meet a need. The perfect word pops out of the storehouse, like, Mistress, you called? As I’m learning to write I’m understanding more and more that reading is a window into someone else’s mind. Firstly the writer creates a dialogue with the self: then the reader becomes the observer, much like the way the eyes of a painted portrait stare through the eyes of the painter, into the eyes of every future viewer of the painting. It’s a pleasure to read someone when you like their mind.
I’m taking a leaf out of Gay’s book because I don’t have the time-space or the mental stamina at the moment to write how I usually write on Substack. (Writing this Gay way, dashed-off short-form, a snapshot of a moment, feels like how I used to write during lockdown, on the Platform of the Damned. I’d write for a few hours, edit once or twice, then I’d be like done, post. Less laboured, lighter.) I’m sitting in a drift of boxes, in my partially dismantled home. It’s a small time of loss inside a big time of loss (the whole world, I’m saying). In the midst of adversity, abiding in presence becomes imperative for psychic survival. It’s notable that Nick Cave dropped his cynicism and started focussing on joy as a direct result of unbearable grief. Beauty is discipline and medicine. That revelation that anger is sometimes just a coat worn by other feelings— that’s a good thing to realise, right? Anger about the kids talking like Americans = love of the vernacular. Anger about losing my home = grief about losing my home = love of my home. It’s better to just talk directly about what I love; not because it’s more charming, but because it’s more true.
Gay: “For the record, before you go there, I’m not being optimistic. I’m just paying attention.”
Vernacular: the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region. Architecture concerned with domestic and functional rather than public or monumental buildings. (Of language) spoken as one's mother tongue; not learned or imposed as a second language.
“In the manner of Montaigne,” says the New Yorker.
See how sucking is built into their name?
“Old gardener’s secret,” Kev calls this technique— pissing into the watering can, then diluting it, that is— it’s good for anything that needs lots of nitrogen, such as brassicas, and obviously, he says, not when you’re about to harvest them, but rather in their early stages of growth.
Speaking of piss, my American friend Neil experienced some confusion when he first came to New Zealand because of the word pissed, which in America means angry, but in New Zealand means drunk.
I wrote ‘world-lover’ and didn’t even notice until the edit.
It makes me think of the way introduced predators decimate native wildlife— but maybe it’s not that bloodthirsty; maybe it’s more like how exotic plant species outcompete the native ones.
i.e. a Xennial, born 1977 - 1983.
Trapped in the Xennial Hinge
Donna Tartt, The Secret History: “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”
Hollywood in old-time NZ slang = an exaggerated performance for dramatic effect, say on the sports field or to get another kid in trouble.
Even these referents make me sound old. Which writing about something like ‘kids these days’ would seem to indicate I am.
I talked about that before, here. Skimming over this piece, I see I also ranted some about the Americanisation of NZ English, and quoted Peter Cape as an example of the way rural New Zealanders used to speak— jokers, sheilas (men, women). Good-oh!
Mongrel Bastard Mothertongue
Seamus Heaney: “It said, ‘Lie down in the word-hoard, burrow the coil and gleam of your furrowed brain. Compose in darkness. Expect aurora borealis in the long foray but no cascade of light. Keep your eye clear as the bleb of the icicle, trust the feel of what nubbed treasure Your hands have known.”
Kev made a word, Mayvember, meaning Southern Hemisphere Spring.
When I first moved to North Carolina, here in the southeastern U.S., back in the 1980s, I was struck by the phrases “might could” and “might should” as well as one of my personal favorites “cut half in two.” Traveling in the mountains, I sometimes heard the old grammar/syntax of earlier times—“I knowed” or “I known” rather than “I knew.” “Fixin’” for “getting ready (I’m fixing to take my dog for a walk). “Liked to have” as in “almost” or “could have”—“He told that joke and I liked to have peed in my pants.”
My friends who grew up in the South still drop these sorts of phrases into their speech from time to time, but regional vernacular speech has pretty much been drowned out, first by radio, then by TV, same as everywhere else.
"Neil experienced some confusion when he first came to New Zealand because of the word pissed". Nothing to the horror that overcame me when, a day or two after first arriving in NZ, a new acquaintance invited me to accompany him to a party he'd been invited to with te words "we might as well go over there and drink their piss".