Topical Guide 832
Mark Dorset
Language: Dialect
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 22:
AN ASIDE, on the Babbington dialect. When we got to the theater, Margot and Martha sent me to wait on line, while they hung out at the curb, talking with their friends.
I did not learn until years later that not everyone waits “on” line, that some people wait “in” line.
Allusion; Quotation
At Home with the Glynns, Chapter 22:
“Wasn’t it Robert Musil,” he said, “who said that ‘no one in the world can free his thinking from the manner in which his time wears the cloak of language. Thus no man can know to what extent he actually means what he writes, and in writing it is far less that people twist words than it is that words twist people’?”
From the satisfied grin he was wearing, I could tell that Mark knew perfectly well that it was Robert Musil who had said—or written—that, and I was at first determined not to give him the further satisfaction of saying that I didn’t know, so I sat there for a while like the tar baby, saying nothing, but his grin began to sag and my resolve wilted.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Was it?”
The grin returned. “I think so,” he said. “I think it was in ‘The Paintspreader,’ one of the pieces in Posthumous Papers of a Living Author.” He paused, then added, with the assurance of one who knows he’s right, “I could be wrong.”
[But of course I wasn’t. Here is the paragraph in which it appears, photographed from Kraft’s copy of Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, to which I have been granted unlimited access. MD
See also:
Language TG 11; Dialect, Slang, Idiolect, Shibboleths, Jargon TG 137, TG 659, TG 754; Slang, Insults, Terms of Abuse TG 140; Slang TG 169; Languages: Learning and Translating TG 393; Idiolect, Private Meanings and References, Code Words TG 373; Idioms: Tug the (One’s) Forelock TG 459; Technical TG 652, Academic, Gibberish TG 492; Language in Translation: Russian to English TG 495; Idioms: English: “It’s Greek to me.” TG 595; Transformations Attendant to the Assimilation of Non-English “Loan Words” in American English, e.g., From Bologna to Baloney TG 624
Allusion; Quotation TG 140, TG 455, TG 462, TG 502, TG 506, TG 532, TG 559, TG 583, TG 592, TG 626, TG 654, TG 657, TG 714, TG 735, TG 736, TG 738, TG 780, TG 781, TG 802, TG 829
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