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1 " But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. And—since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form—the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirrorshards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light. "
― Donna Tartt ,
2 " The busybody (banned as sexist, demeaning to older women) who lives next door called my daughter a tomboy (banned as sexist) when she climbed the jungle (banned; replaced with " rain forest" ) gym. Then she had the nerve to call her an egghead and a bookworm (both banned as offensive; replaced with " intellectual" ) because she read fairy (banned because suggests homosexuality; replace with " elf" ) tales.I'm tired of the Language Police turning a deaf ear (banned as handicapism) to my complaints. I'm no Pollyanna (banned as sexist) and will not accept any lame (banned as offensive; replace with " walks with a cane" ) excuses at this time. (banned as ethnocentric; replace with " Doctrine" or " Belief" ), why can't my daughter play stickball (banned as regional or ethnic bias) on boy's night out (banned as sexist)? Why can't she build a snowman (banned, replace with " snow person" ) without that fanatic (banned as ethnocentric; replace with " believer," " follower," or " adherent" ) next door telling her she's going to hell (banned; replaced with " heck" or " darn" )?Do you really think this is what the Founding Fathers (banned as sexist; replace with " the Founders" or " the Framers" ) had in mind? That we can't even enjoy our Devil (banned)-ed ham sandwiches in peace? I say put a stop to this cult (banned as ethnocentric) of PC old wives' tales (banned as sexist; replace with " folk wisdom" ) and extremist (banned as ethnocentric; replace with " believer," " follower," or " adherent" ) conservative duffers (banned as demeaning to older men).As an heiress (banned as sexist; replace with " heir" ) to the first amendment, I feel that only a heretic (use with caution when comparing religions) would try to stop American vernacular from flourishing in all its inspirational (banned as patronizing when referring to a person with disabilities) splendor. "
3 " The obvious difficulty that has prevented the study of European culture becoming a part of the regular curriculum of studies is its vastness and its complexity. The great advantage of classical education was the fact that it involved the study of only two languages and two literatures and histories. But European culture has produced about twenty vernacular literatures, and its history is spread out among an even larger number of political communities. At first sight it is an unmanageable proposition and we can understand how educationalists have so often come to acquiesce in a cultural nationalism which at least saved them from being overwhelmed by a multiplicity of strange tongues and unknown literatures. But the true method, it seems to me, is rather to find the consitutive factors of the European community and to make them the basis of our study.This means reversing the traditional nationalist approach which concentrated the student's attention on the distinctive characteristics of the national cultures and disregarded or passed lightly over the features that they shared in common. It means also that we should have to devote much more attention to the religious development, since it was in religion that Europe found its original basis of unity. "
― Christopher Henry Dawson , Understanding Europe
4 " I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant.Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like " Eat his body! Drink his blood!" It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility. "
5 " Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. "
― Joanna Russ
6 " Unravelling the complexity of human development is a daunting task and it is unlikely that scientists will ever be able to do so for even one individual, because the interactions of biology and environment are likelihoods and not certainties. There are just too many ways that the cards could stack up. More importantly, as the vernacular saying goes, " Shit happens" , which is a very succinct and scientifically accurate way of saying that random events during development can change the course of who we become in unpredictable ways. "
7 " If you care about being thought credible and intelligent, do not use complex language where simpler language will do. My Princeton colleague Danny Oppenheimer refuted a myth prevalent among undergraduates about the vocabulary that professors find most impressive. In an article titled " Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly," he showed that couching familiar ideas in pretentious language is taken as a sign of poor intelligence and low credibility. "
8 " I am often described to my irritation as a 'contrarian' and even had the title inflicted on me by the publisher of one of my early books. (At least on that occasion I lived up to the title by ridiculing the word in my introduction to the book's first chapter.) It is actually a pity that our culture doesn't have a good vernacular word for an oppositionist or even for someone who tries to do his own thinking: the word 'dissident' can't be self-conferred because it is really a title of honor that has to be won or earned, while terms like 'gadfly' or 'maverick' are somehow trivial and condescending as well as over-full of self-regard. And I've lost count of the number of memoirs by old comrades or ex-comrades that have titles like 'Against the Stream,' 'Against the Current,' 'Minority of One,' 'Breaking Ranks' and so forth—all of them lending point to Harold Rosenberg's withering remark about 'the herd of independent minds.' Even when I was quite young I disliked being called a 'rebel': it seemed to make the patronizing suggestion that 'questioning authority' was part of a 'phase' through which I would naturally go. On the contrary, I was a relatively well-behaved and well-mannered boy, and chose my battles with some deliberation rather than just thinking with my hormones. "
― Christopher Hitchens , Hitch 22: A Memoir
9 " Then his singing paused, and he stood for a moment to cry out softly in the vernacular of the region: 'Blest be Adonoi Elohim, King of All, who maketh bread to spring forth from the earth,' in a sort of nasal bleat. The bleat being finished, he sat again, and commenced eating. The wanderer had come a long way indeed, thought Brother Francis, who knew of no adjacent realm governed by a monarch with such an unfamiliar name and such strange pretensions. "
― Walter M. Miller Jr. , A Canticle for Leibowitz (St. Leibowitz, #1)
10 " Putting into words what exactly was off is not easy. I myself don’t even understand it. It was like a replica of my best friend was sitting in front of me, saying well-rehearsed lines at the wrong cues whilst I struggled to remember my dialogues. It was as if you had talked to me in some other language, a vernacular I used to be fluent in; but now, although the words sounded familiar, I really had no idea what you meant. "
11 " There are a couple of reasons why I take comfort in being able to put all this in my own vernacular and present it to you. For one thing, because then I'm not completely alone with it. And for another, it gives me a sense of being in control of the craziness. Now this is a delusion, but it's MY delusion and I'm sticking with it. It's sort of like: I have problems but problems don't have me. "
― Carrie Fisher , Wishful Drinking
12 " 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. "