Vernacular Quotes

Love?
Yes.
Gideon chuckled.
Why did you say yes like that?
Oh, I thought you were asking me a question.
I see.
Then he truly did see what she meant, and his heart flipped over in his chest.
Darling?
Gideon smiled at the warmth the endearment flooded him with.
Yes, Neliss?
Oh, nothing. Just fulfilling my end of the deal.
The deal?
Yes. You made me a deal.
You lost me, he sighed.
Legna lifted her head, propped an elbow up against the pillow of his chest, and settled her chin in her palm so she could look down at him.
"You said that I would get something very special if I called you that."
"Did I?" he asked, his eyes brightening with speculation as he thought back on it. "Actually, I think you have that confused with the deal about saying my name."
"I like your name," she said with a smile. "I always thought mine was awful snobbish. But yours has me beat hands down."
"My name is one of the finest and oldest names in all of our history."
"That's only because you have lived to be such an older tosser."
"Tosser?"
"British vernacular, luv."
"What are you, my dialect coach all of a sudden? Is this your idea of postcoital pillow talk?"
Legna giggled, apologizing with a clinging kiss on his lips. It clearly calmed him, making him smile in a very cat-versus-canary way.
"Is there something you would prefer I say?" she asked compliantly.
"That yes a few sentences ba ~ Jacquelyn Frank

Personally, I think we should remove the word "shooting" from the vernacular. It's an ugly, biased word that somehow creates the assumption that a gun was involved. Let's go with 'Interpersonal Ballistic Event' (IBE). ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of "proof" in hand, we can disprove a god's existence in this way: If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. In other words, the absence of evidence - if evidence should be there - is indeed evidence of absence. ~ Jerry A. Coyne

I had just sat down with my plate of food and hit play on the new CD player I'd received the night before, ready to hear the sounds of Handel's opening movement, when I remembered the horses.

"Ah hell!" I cursed, sounding exactly like my dad. It was hard not to grow up swearing when you lived on a farm. We never took the Lord's name in vain or said the F-word, but pretty much damn, hell, and shit were part of the vernacular of most folks born and raised in Levan. To tell the truth, those words weren't really considered swear words. Last week in church, Gordon Aagard was giving a sermon on trials. He referred to horse shit right in the middle of his talk, and nobody really batted an eye. ~ Amy Harmon

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

Alan Lomax is the person who I think should be given major credit for what has been called the "Folk Song Revival." My father participated with him because my father was a musicologist and urged trained musicians to learn about "the vernacular." ~ Pete Seeger

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

Pretty much I would let Gemma know
that she is a fat cunt
and, um the shoes that she gave me were
not something that I would particularly
buy for myself.

They were old maiden type of shoes, and
she said that those shoes were meant to
be worn on a beautiful woman

So if that is the case she should have put
them back on the rack and she should
never even purchased them because she
was UNQUALIFIED to own those shoes if
that's the case

and, um I think that Gemma is just a
disgrace. She's a disgrace to women who are
actually beautiful and classy and, um she
just doesn't have the vernacular she
thinks she possesses

Somebody lied to her several times and
told her that she was fly, hot and sexy
and beautiful and she's nothing like that
She's nothing of the sort ~ Tiffany Pollard

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.

I tended to emphasize the secular, the casual, the colloquial, the vernacular against the sacred. ~ David Antin

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

I've always been obsessed with electronics and using computers and software. It's always been part of my vernacular. ~ Sufjan Stevens

Whatever it is, I cannot seem to pull off something as simple as dinner between the two of us. As you know, my first attempt ended with us eating pizza standing up (and her paying for her own slice).

My second attempt was even worse: We spent most of the evening in an animal hospital. And then I very suavely added insult to injury by sexually harassing her on Max Friedlander's aunt's couch. She fled, in romance-novel vernacular, like a startled fawn. As well she should have: I'm sure I must have seemed like a teenager in postprom heat. ~ Meg Cabot

What interests me is what you might call vernacular writing, writing that connects you to a place. ~ Calvin Trillin

Voice is the je ne sais quoi of spirited writing. It separates brochures and brilliance, memo and memoir, a ship's log and The Old Man and the Sea. The best writers stamp prose with their own distinctive personality; their timbre and tone are as recognizable as their voices on the phone. To cultivate voice, you must listen for the music of language-the vernacular, the syntactic tics, the cadences. ~ Constance Hale

The Scottish vernacular is rich in colourful euphemisms for inebriation: 'stocious', 'stotting', 'guttered', 'steaming', 'steamboats', 'wellied' and 'hoolit' are just a few. Another is 'mortal', as in 'I was fair mortal last night' (meaning 'I was very drunk indeed'). So 'Mortal Causes' evoked, in my mind, the demon drink, just as surely as it did any darker and more violent imagery. ~ Ian Rankin

It's time to start recognizing that not all escapist entertainment is created equal. And that some of it isn't even entertainment. Miss March is, to use the vernacular of the escapist moviegoer, the biggest pile of crap I've seen in ages. ~ Stephanie Zacharek

MOST legislators have been men of inferior capacity whom chance exalted over their fellows, and who took counsel almost exclusively of their own prejudices and whims.

It would seem that they had not even a sense of the greatness and dignity of their work: they amused themselves by framing childish institutions, well devised indeed to please small minds, but discrediting their authors with people of sense.

They flung themselves into useless details; and gave their attention to individual interests: the sign of the narrow genius, which grasps things piecemeal and cannot take a general view.

Some of them have been so affected as to employ another language than the vernacular-a ridiculous thing in a framer of laws; for how can they be obeyed if they are not known?

They have often abolished needlessly those which were already established-that is to say, they have plunged nations into the confusion which always accompanies change.

It is true that, by reason of some extravagance springing rather from the nature than from the mind of man, it is sometimes necessary to change certain laws. But the case is rare; and when it happens it requires the most delicate handling; much solemnity ought to be observed, and endless precautions taken, in order to lead the people to the natural conclusion that the laws are most sacred, since so many formalities are necessary to their abrogation.

Often they have made them too subtle, fol ~ Montesquieu

In the fourteenth century, Italian literature was, by requirement, divided into two categories: tragedy, representing high literature, was written in formal Italian; comedy, representing low literature, was written in the vernacular and geared toward the general population. ~ Dan Brown

Go too far outside "the box," of course, and you will encounter a vernacular that is much less "tolerant." Here, the key words are "fanatic," "troublemaker," "misfit" or "malcontent. ~ Christopher Hitchens

Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. ~ Charles McGrath

Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus, have touched their disciples' hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables, and stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart. ~ Daniel Goleman

In the vernacular of my grandfather, 'I does not care.' ~ Herman Cain

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

I read Norman Lock's The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain's original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy - and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America's greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive. ~ David Oshinsky

one of the Library's mottos was borrowed directly from the great military thinker Clausewitz: no strategy ever survived contact with the enemy. Or, in the vernacular, Things Will Go Wrong. Be Prepared. She ~ Genevieve Cogman

Oh, this I have to see. I love it when you go for the vernacular. Jugular. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

But the truth is that I had never wanted him to kiss me, not in the way you are supposed to want these things. I mean, he was gorgeous. I was attracted to him. I thought about him in that way, to borrow a phrase from the middle school vernacular. But the actual touch, the realized touch ... it was all wrong. ~ John Green

Descartes argued "I think, therefore I am," and people after Freud translated that into the modern vernacular by saying, "I feel, therefore I am a self"; modern evangelicals of the relational type seem to have added their own quirk to it by saying that "I feel religiously, therefore I am a self." The search for the religious self then becomes a search for religious good feelings. But the problem with making good feelings the end for which one is searching is, as Henry Fairlie argues, that it is possible to feel good about oneself, even religiously, "in states of total vacuity, euphoria, intoxication, and self-indulgence, and it is even possible when we are doing wrong and know what we are doing." This kind of self-fascination is by no means an excrescence of an otherwise robust sector of religious life. It is at the very center of evangelicalism. ~ David F. Wells

I just finished reading Pearl Cleage 'What looks like Crazy on an ordinary day' and Ernessa T. Carter '32 Candles'; they were both fantastic. I had almost giving up hope of finding anything I'd like to read. They contained relatable topics and wrote in vernacular that made me feel at ease with the whole process. I think I'm rediscovering my love of books from these two amazing authors. ~ Ernessa T. Carter

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. ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.' ~ Dave Chappelle

Of course, Mr B. proceeded to stipulate, you must look at both sides of the question. It is hard to lay down any hard and fast rules as to right and wrong but room for improvement all round there certainly is though every country, they say, our own distressful included, has the government it deserves. But with a little goodwill all round. It's all very fine to boast of mutual superiority but what about mutual equality. I resent violence and intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due instalments plan. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak another vernacular, in the next house so to speak. ~ James Joyce

In 2009, I began creating 'Waterworks' with the new vernacular coming from the 'Signs of Life' work in Las Vegas. ~ John Van Hamersveld

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

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

I'm working on poems about work, I guess. Or related to work. Which sounds dull as drywall but I'm having great fun working the vernacular of work into poems. I'm also writing some poems about family. And I don't know, just writing. Taking breaks. Writing some more. ~ Randall Mann

The so-called language of Barbara Kruger is vernacular language. Obviously, I pick through bits and pieces of it and figure out to some degree how to objectify my experience of the world, using pictures and words that construct and contain me. ~ Barbara Kruger

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing's identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design. ~ John Van Hamersveld

Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. ~ Robert Bringhurst

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 Babington Macaulay

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

I'm motivated by injustice, which is embedded and constant and wrong - not by a vernacular soundboard. ~ Amy Richards

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. ~ Daniel Kahneman

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. ~ Jane Finn

I was all, "Oh, dog, Countess gonna crack open a forty of whup-ass on you now. Oh, you in the sh*t now, wigga!" (I am not incline to use hip-hop vernacular often, but there are times when, like French, it just better expresses the sentiment of the moment.) -Abby ~ Christopher Moore

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

The word 'demand' is a tricky word when used by our gender. When used by men, it's part of their vernacular. ~ Robin Wright

All of the modern counseling vernacular is really not dealing with the root issue of idolatry. Someone or something's preeminent rather than God. ~ Mark Driscoll

I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form. It never reaches anything or stops anything. A revolution must come on the due installments plans. It's a patent absurdity on the face of it to hate people because they live round the corner and speak a different vernacular, so to speak. ~ James Joyce

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? ~ Constance Hale

Nowadays we are fond of literal translations ... That would have seemed a crime to translators in ages past ... They wanted to prove that the vernacular was as capable of a great poem as the original. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

What about little microphones? What if everyone swallowed them, and they played the sounds of our hearts through little speakers, which could be in the pouches of our overalls? When you skateboarded down the street at night you could hear everyone's heartbeat, and they could hear yours, sort of like sonar. One weird thing is, I wonder if everyone's hearts would start to beat at the same time, like how women who live together have their menstrual periods at the same time, which I know about, but don't really want to know about. That would be so weird, except that the place in the hospital where babies are born would sound like a crystal chandelier in a houseboat, because the babies wouldn't have had time to match up their heartbeats yet. And at the finish line at the end of the New York City Marathon it would sound like war. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur. ~ Joanna Russ

they read Hurston not only for the spiritual kinship inherent in such relations but because she used black vernacular speech and rituals, in ways Subtle and various, to chart the coming to consciousness of black women, so glaringly absent in other black fiction. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

The track lingered on the surface like a long pale scar. In maritime vernacular, this trail of fading disturbance, whether from ship or torpedo, was called a dead wake. ~ Erik Larson

My several years in the word game have learnt me several rules:
(1) Avoid alliteration. Always
(2) Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.
(3) Avoid clichés like the plague. (They're old hat.)
(4) Employ the vernacular.
(5) Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.
(6) Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.
(7) It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.
(8) Contractions aren't necessary.
(9) Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.
(10) One should never generalize.
(11) Eliminate quotations. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."
(12) Comparisons are as bad as clichés.
(13) Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.
(14) Profanity sucks.
(15) Be more or less specific.
(16) Understatement is always best.
(17) Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.
(18) One-word sentences? Eliminate.
(19) Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.
(20) The passive voice is to be avoided.
(21) Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.
(22) Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.
(23) Who needs rhetorical questions? ~ Frank L. Visco

Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion. ~ Bell Hooks

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

To put it in the contemporary vernacular, Baal and Asherah were in effect the patron saints of sex and guns and rock 'n' roll, promising to deliver a potent mixture of satisfaction to the desires for power, success, and pleasure. This ~ Iain M. Duguid

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

The supposedly eyewitness authority of the Pseudo-Turpin finds a parallel in another genre in which vernacular prose was pioneered: that of the historical memoir. There were twelfth-century verse histories narrated by authors who had personally participated in the events they describe, such as the Third Crusade. But the Fourth Crusade of 1202-4 saw a switch to prose. This shameful fiasco, in which the crusaders were induced to turn aside from the Holy Land and attack instead the Christian city of Constantinople, inspired two contrasting accounts. Robert de Clari--ignorant of higher-level strategy, but all agog at the splendours of Constantinople--gives a worm's eye view. Geoffroi de Villehardouin, by contrast, has a top diplomat's suave authority and a leader's eye for the aesthetics of war--the splendid sight of a fleet, or the noble heroism of a ruler. For both authors the medium of prose seems to convey the purported authenticity and transparency of lived experience. ~ Sarah Cay Terence Cave Malcolm Bowie

The tension between autonomy and expertise had been, at a basic level, fundamental to the Protestant experience itself from the Reformation forward, as the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, increasing literacy, and vernacular translations of the Bible undermined the clerical caste's monopoly on spiritual authority. In the twentieth-century United States, professional specialization, the Progressive emphasis on technical expertise, and simply the ever more complex nature of modern urban life pulled readers toward greater reliance on literary guidance, while the logic of consumerism, rooted in the all-powerful choice to buy or not to buy, further reinforced the notion of reader autonomy. ~ Matthew Hedstrom

The Catholic Church has a dignity far surpassing that of every merely human society, for it was founded by Christ the Lord. It is altogether fitting, therefore, that the language it uses should be noble, majestic, and non-vernacular. ~ Pope John XXIII

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. ~ Eric Kripke

The Queue consists entirely of fragments of ochered' dialogue, a linguistic vernacular anchored by the long-suffering word stoyat' (to stand). You stood? Yes, stood. Three hours. Got damaged ones. Wrong size. Here's what the line wasn't: a gray inert nowhere. Imagine instead an all-Soviet public square, a hurly-burly where comrades traded gossip and insults, caught up with news left out of the newspapers, got into fistfights, or enacted comradely feats. In the thirties the NKVD had informers in queues to assess public moods, hurrying the intelligence straight to Stalin's brooding desk. Lines shaped opinions and bred ad hoc communities: citizens from all walks of life standing, united by probably the only truly collective authentic Soviet emotions: yearning and discontent (not to forget the unifying hostility toward war veterans and pregnant women, honored comrades allowed to get goods without a wait). ~ Anya Von Bremzen

There are tools that help sharpen freestyle skills like having a diverse vernacular, some sense of music theory, being outspoken, phrasing, spacing, cross word puzzles, thesauruses, the ability to expand on an issue and embellish that with more descriptive terminology. ~ Myka 9

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

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

You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. ~ Mark Twain

Until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I'm going to have to do this sort of thing. ~ C.S. Lewis

'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

I nod seriously, "Supes."
"You're mocking me."
"A little bit."
"People say supes!"
"What people?"
"I can't believe you're shaming me right now. I'm very sensitive about my use of cool vernacular."
"Then we're good. Because you haven't used any." I flash a grin. ~ Lauren Miller

Yes. He argued that we are the gods, that we create our own destiny. That what we are determines what will become of us. In a peasantlike vernacular, we all paint ourselves into corners from which there is no escape simply by being ourselves and interacting with other selves. ~ Glen Cook

I have a vernacular house on the seaside in Northumberland and an Edwardian semi in south Manchester. They're both exactly as big as they need to be. I can't be doing with an ostentatious, big house - you can only be in one room at a time. ~ Val McDermid

Lady," we always call each other, partly a joke, partly in earnest, using still the old word, in its full flavor a kind of exorcism against "saleslady," "old lady," "ladylike." Relishing the anachronism, even the formality a type of aphrodisiac, a contrast to our delight in the horny, the vulgar, the vernacular which we cultivate just as ardently. ~ Kate Millett

In an artistic sense, cool came to refer to someone with a signature artistic style so integral as to exude an authentic mode-of-being in the world: Miles, Bogart, Brando, Eastwood, Greco, Elvis, Lady Day, Sinatra. Such a person created something from nothing and gave the world some new artistic or psychological 'equipment for living,' to use a phrase of Kenneth Burke's. A signature style is yours and can only be carried by you: it cannot be abstracted except through dilution and commodification since it reflects an individual's complex personal experience. In this sense, cool was 'making a dollar out of fifteen cents,' to pull another phrase from the Africa-American vernacular. Lester Young was once at a bar when a tenor saxophone solo floated out of the jukebox. 'That's me,' he said happily. As he listened his mood collapsed - he realized it was one of his many imitators. 'No, that's not me,' he said sadly. To steal someone else's sound or style and capitalize on it has always been un-cool, the pretense of posers. ~ Joel Dinerstein

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. ~ Vincent Price

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

Telling people what you want, speaking desire, and I could hear the air quotes in her voice, the ones she used when she slipped into grad-school vernacular. It's like telling people how to hurt you, handing them instructions. ~ Miranda Popkey

Better than chanting a thousand words in a dead language is one soothing word spoken in the vernacular. ~ Gautama Buddha