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Vernacular Quotes

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Vernacular Quotes

“The Arabic Qur'an and authoritative Christian translations of the Bible into a limited number of languages contributed profoundly to the universalisation of a single ethnic religious—linguistic community in the Muslim case and to the distinction between major written languages and dialectic vernaculars in the Christian case. While the Islamic socio-political impact was thus in principle almost entirely anti-ethnic and anti-national, the Christian impact was more complex. Its willingness to translate brought with it, undoubtedly, a reduction in the number of ethnicities and vernaculars, but then a confirmation of the individual identity of those that remained: Christianity in fact helped turn ethnicities into nations.”

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Book:The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism
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“We had one horse, one mule, and a wagon. We had Horhay with his limp arm and his long past, and Dickie with his hopes for the necklace now dashed and turned to dread of its curse, and me with my ache for your mother who was destined to take her leave of me, and you with a life before you and a look of puzzlement on your face. We had your mother and her sweet baby to be. All together, it was a untidy mix of items.”

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Book:The Madstone: A Novel
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“Those who wish to write quickly a piece about nothing that no one will read through even once, whether in a newspaper or a book, extol with much conviction the style of the spoken language, because they find it much more modern, direct, facile. They themselves do not know how to speak. Neither do their readers, the language actually spoken under modern conditions of life being socially reduced to its indirect representation through the suffrage of the media, and including around six or eight turns of phrase repeated at every moment and fewer than two hundred words, most of them neologisms, with the whole thing submitted to replacement by one third every six months. All this favours a certain rapid solidarity. On the contrary, I for my part am going to write without affectation or fatigue, as if it were the most natural and easiest thing in the world, the language that I have learned and, in most circumstances, spoken. It’s not up to me to change it. The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never compelled to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language, the lie must reign.”

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Book:Panegyric: Books 1 & 2
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“Modern nationalism swept Europe alongside the flourishing of industrialisation. Across the continent, poets and intellectuals cultivated and often heavily modified vernacular languages to be bearers of 19th century modernity. These guardians of language faced significant challenges in adapting the spoken tongues of the peasantry to the demands of high literature and natural science. The story for the arts is widely known: modern Hungarian, Czech, Italian, Hebrew, Polish and other literatures blossomed in the second half of the century. However, the high valuation for efficiency in the sciences somewhat tamed this incipient Babel ["Absolute English," Aeon, February 4, 2015].”

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Author:Michael D. Gordin
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“What happened in Scotland in the 1960s and the 1970s and what laid the foundation for the enormous creative achievements of the 1980s was the liberation of the voice. The Scottish voice declared its independence. The liberation of the voice was at first the acceptance of and an assertion of the vernacular. But the real liberation of the voice came not from the assertion of the rights of the vernacular itself, but from the assertion of the right to move without boundaries between the vernacular and standard English, between the demotic and the literary.”

ScotlandLiteraryVernacular1970s1980sScottish CultureStandard EnglishDemoticScottish Voice
Book:Out of History: Narrative Paradigms in Scottish and British Culture
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“When you're writing TV or movies your vernacular is time, it's all based on rhythms, a character takes a beat or two characters have a moment, like everything is about time. And when you're writing a comic, everything is about space. It's how many panels to put on a page, when should you do a full page splash, what is the detail that you see in any particular image.”

ShouldWritingTwoMomentsCharacterSpaceParticularTvsPagesBeatsDetailsRhythmComicVernacular
Author:Eric Kripke
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“Writers today must navigate the shifting verbal currents of the post-Gutenberg era. When does jargon end and a new vernacular begin? Where's the line between neologism and hype? What's the language of the global village? How can we keep pace with technology without getting bogged down in buzzwords? Is it possible to write about machines without losing a sense of humanity and poetry?”

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Author:Constance Hale
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“The Color Purple really floored me. That book was just incredible because I loved the language. The biggest deal of that book was that I loved the poetry of broken English. Broken English and vernacular. It just floored me that you can actually capture the way people really talked. And I also really connected to the social class element.”

PeopleWayBookLanguageSocialDealsClassColorBrokenElementsIncrediblesConnectedCapturePurpleSocial ClassVernacularBroken English
Author:Matt de la Pena
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“What's impossible not to notice, though - it's all around us - is the diminution of American prose: How pedestrian it has become. Pick up any short story and listen to its voice, the tedious easy vernacular that mistakes transcription for realism. This would display an understandable pragmatism if it were a pandering to common-denominator readers; but it is, in fact, a kind of hifalultin literary ideology, the less-is-more Hemingway legacy put through an up-to-the-minute industrial blender.”

IfsKindFactsStoriesEasyVoiceCommonMistakeImpossibleMinutesReaderPicksIdeologyLegacyProseShort StoryDisplayRealismTediousPragmatismCommon DenominatorPedestriansLess Is MoreVernacularBlendersTranscription
Author:Cynthia Ozick
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“The concept of why is already in the vernacular. It is now a noun. "That company doesn't know their why." "They need to learn their why." "That politician needs to understand his why." We talk about it as a noun. That never existed prior to 2009. That never existed prior to 2006 when I first started articulating it. This is the most amazing thing to me. It has now become a concept. It's part of the way we think about businesses and transactions and decisions.”

ThinkingKnowsWayNeedsFirstsDecisionCompanyPoliticianConceptsAmazing ThingsTransactionsMost AmazingNounsVernacularArticulating
Author:Simon Sinek
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“The funny thing is, nationalism only could have come about in Europe after the invention of printing. You could have this thing that was a book in a vernacular language, and you could imagine there were other readers of this book who you couldn't see, but they were a theoretical union of readers who all use the same language. That is kind of a prerequisite for a national fantasy. You need that thing, and it's a strange thing.”

NeedsKindBookUseLanguageFantasyImagineStrangeReaderEuropeUnionsInventionNationalismTheoreticalFunny ThingsPrintingStrange ThingsPrerequisitesVernacular
Author:Ben Katchor
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“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.”

PeopleIfsThinkingKnowsShouldWritingTryingUseSeemsLanguageBusinessMarketingAdvertisingGrammarVernacularGreat AdvertisingAdvertising And MarketingBuying SomethingOnline AdvertisingNever Stop Improving
Author:David Ogilvy
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“I'm extremely profane, unconsciously so, when I see something great for the first time; I don't know why, but beauty and profanity are related to me in the same way. It may be that I want to think of art in the vernacular, but I have no control over what comes out of my mouth when my eyes take in great beauty...it might just be the reason I avoid going to museums with elderly ladies.”

ThinkingKnowsWayWantFirstsMayArtReasonMightEyeMouthsFirst TimeRelatedMuseumsElderlyProfaneProfanityVernacular
Book:I like what I know: a visual autobiography
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