What do you think of vernacular speech? Do you think that the

I dunno, sure.

>>7615529
Thanks for the contribution to the thread anon.

WHY CAN'T PEOPLE BE LIKE THE CHARACTERS IN MY BOOKS WAAAAHHH

>>7615575

Did you read my post at all? You have missed the point of this thread entirely.

I am talking about vernacular speech and it's contrast with good prose in literature.

>>7615588
fag.

Ponce faggot -- you just live in a shit hole mate with shit vernacular

>>7615528
Comic is bad, weesh old man flo

Should b

Basically / literally / actually

Exeunt:{|

>>7615622

Thanks for contributing to the thread.

>>7615626
Are you just gonna say the same boring shit to every shitposter? Typical of u, innit

>>7615631

I don't bother putting much thought in articulating myself in different ways just to entertain a shitposter when my sentiment can be expressed concisely in what I have already written.

I think we should all speak like stroke victims and brain damaged people, you know because that would be sensitive to stroke victims and brain damaged people.

>>7615635
Wasn't even shitposting. You're a ponce cunt and should know it.

Read Conrad and Chaucer you fanny.

>>7615528

all for it, slang, idioms etc.

This how I speak

http://www.stevenroyedwards.com/irishenglishterms.html

>>7615653

Thanks for the recommendation. Any particular book of theirs that you think I could begin with?

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Just be really careful if you start trying to be a big vocabulary smarty man. It's so weird when you see some guy on /lit/ (for example) click into Erudition Mode because he's self-conscious that he's discussing a Smart Topic. Suddenly this otherwise normal dude has to be all like
>Greetings /lit/. It occurs to me that my vernacular, is, rather, quite lacking, indeed. Ergo, I would like to remediate this by ...
It reminds me of that dude guarding the bridge in Arcanum. Pic related.

We're kind of in this weird watershed moment in postmodern mass culture where any posh register seems insincere and affected. But it also can't be argued that people are getting dumber and verbal intelligence is plummeting. Having to pick between one or the other (being deliberately folksy to avoid being insincere, or becoming "mm, indeed, quite verily" guy just to avoid dumbing down the species) isn't much help.

>>7615635
You do realize that every time you say something boring in your thread you just make people not want to participate, regardless of the reason why you felt obliged to say something boring, right?

No wonder you think your language is boring m8 - you don't even know how to talk to people.

>>7615662
Nah it's more like this board is filled with spastic autismal cunts. His posting is fine, go back to memeing about Pynchon faggot

>>7615657
Read the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales untranslated. Key example of middle English Vernacular.

Most of Conrad's works employ the use of vernacular in dialogue; The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' is a good example.

Ya ponce batty

>>7615635
>I'm boring

>>7615657
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-xpzfsY4bU

Here's a reading ponce prat

>>7615661
What you perceive as an intelligent or posh register is nothing more than the speaker affecting a Latinate tongue and avoiding anglo-saxon speech patterns.

Theres nothing more intelligent about using Latin descendant speech than Saxon descended speech, its the connotations of those tongue's people that you are seeing.

Authorities tended to use Latinate speech. Lower class everymen tended to use anglosprecht. Thus the respective connotations of sophisticated verbal trickery, and trustworthy vulgarity.

In truth, one is no more sophisticated than the other. I enjoy the sonic qualities of rough Anglo-saxon over the sometimes effete Latin style, personally.

>>7615528
Language cannot degrade.

Preferences for diction simply change.

>>7615661

>Just be really careful if you start trying to be a big vocabulary smarty man

Sure. That's exactly why I mentioned that I don't want to be a pretentious thesaurus quoting person who attempts to 'appear' smarter than he actually is.

What I do want to achieve however is to speak in a manner that in some sense articulates what I want to convey in a compelling and aesthetic manner.

> We're kind of in this weird watershed moment in postmodern mass culture where any posh register seems insincere and affected. But it also can't be argued that people are getting dumber and verbal intelligence is plummeting

I agree. However, i believe that I can still make drastic improvements in how we speak without going overboard and needlessly sounding affected.

>>7615662
I feel no obligation to prostitute myself for anons who decide to contribute to a thread based on replies to a shitposter instead of the topic of the discussion.

However, you're right. I still am deterring people from contributing due to my replies. Which is why I made this thread. I admit. My language is boring.

>>7615686
>>7615668

Thanks for the help. I usually don't take this advice from severely autistic twats but I will make an exception for you :)

>>7615707
You're the autist ya faggot

>>7615706

Depends on how you define degradation. Why do we learn rules of grammar in school? Why is some prose considered better and more enjoyable than other?

Surely you can't deny that aesthetics play a major role in language.

Its interesting, I was just reading about the English renaissance and before Edmund Spenser came into the scene England was more or less considered the laughing stock of nations in terms of poetry. You can probably count on a single hand all the great poets of the English language that come close to those of France or Italy, although my opinion may be a little presumptuous I can't seem to think it too inaccurate.

>>7615707
Shitposting is a art, friend.

Watch Australia and learn to not b boring

>>7615719
Poetry in romance languages is ez-mode
Everything rhymes automatically

You guys ever think like....the reason you don't suck dick is because you know you'll love it.

Kind of like why I never watched Breaking Bad or fucked a tranny, because I know I'd get way into it, and I just don't have the kind of time to spend on marathoning that damn show, or scouring craigslist for hours looking for traps.

>>7615528
Well written books are not written as the author would speak in conversation. A well written book, prose wise, has every sentence expertly edited to be aesthetically pleasing, artful, beautiful, meaningful and interesting (or at least this is true in theory). Every sentence takes time to form, much longer than it takes to simply convey your ideas in common speech. Nobody speaks like prose is written, don't be concerned that you don't either.

That's not to say that some people don't speak better than others, but 99% of what makes them better speakers is simply thinking about what they say before just blurting any old sentence out, and making sure they phrase it clearly and concisely, not the 'um yeah, but um you know like, sort of um yeah kind of like' speech that is more common now.

>>7615719
You mean the pre-renaissance poets that came close to their romance cousins? 'Cause post-renaissance England ruled the waves of poetry.

>>7615696
Not who you responded to.

I've given it some shallow thought, and had the idea that in order to have a more 'impressive' sounding or interesting speech I should try and convey feeling and intent through my word choice rather than just delivery. Thus having my prose function in the same way that it would in a poem. This isn't to say I'm a spergo-bot that normally expels speech like a computer does data, just that a more concerted effort could be made to convey more meaning through word choice, rather than relying on tone and expression. I haven't really attempted it in day to day conversation because I'm too retarded and not autistic enough to change my vernacular.

>>7615734
Your writing isn't entertaining. Very few listeners - sad!

>>7615732

Really good point. I agree that well written books are expertly edited to be aesthetic, artful, beautiful and interesting and it is impractical to expect or incorporate that form in common speech.

I also agree that thinking before speaking out loud is helpful. Although I wish our regular communication was a bit more pithy because what I've been reading makes vernacular speech sound so terribly banal.

>>7615734

>a more concerted effort could be made to convey more meaning through word choice, rather than relying on tone and expression

Sure. Word choice is a major component of being more articulate and I agree. I believe that tone and expression should be secondary mediums that just supplement what you speak instead of major factors that convey your sentiment.

OP here.

To everyone in this thread. I also believe that our speech heavily influences how we think which is why I stress the importance of quality vernacular.

Here's an example:

I recently realized that my reaction to even the mildest unpredicted events would be a verbal
"what the hell" or "what the fuck".

I overused the word "fuck" and it began to be a major part of my diction. It hampered my thought about that event itself because I could now easily classify it under the broad sentence of "what the hell" rather than thinking about it in a more nuanced way.

What do you think?

>>7615741
:(

Be aware of how concision affects the force of your words.

Aim always for laconic speech, save for circumstances requiring loquacious circumlocution, as ceremony

>>7615757
I think you're at least on the fringes of autism.

>>7615767

>Aim always for laconic speech, save for circumstances requiring loquacious circumlocution, as ceremony

Do you realize how pretty that sentence sounds? It brought a smile to my face :)

>>7615768

My god. I will consult a doctor right away!

>>7615757
You lose shades of expression when you ramp everything up to fuck. Modulo paralinguistic phenomena like vocal volume, tone, emphasis. Stuff that isn't preserved in writing.

>>7615774
:)

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>>7615782
>

>>7615788
Autism dot jay peg

>>7615788
>>7615789

Please excuse me while I go kill myself.

>>7615792
Loighten up m8 weyre jest arvin a loff

>>7615783

That makes sense. this is why I'm limiting my usage of umbrella terms like "fuck" to react or "gay"/"autistic" to describe.

>>7615803
Cool. Look up the availability heuristic. You're probably making the same word choices because they always come immediately to mind. You have to begin by discarding that initial reflex and substituting it with something else, which will feel awkward at first.

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>>7615528
>I don't want to be a fedora-wearing thesaurus quoting pretentious neckbeard
>but I do want to incorporate a sort of subtle beauty in my speech

>>7615528
If you use boring words, you will be boring. If you use beautiful words, you will sound beautiful. If you use intelligent words, you will sound like an intellectual. Don't blame your lack of a vocabulary on the language. Your ineptness is your own fault.

>>7615840

>implying that the fedora-wearing-thesaurus-quoting-pretentious-neckbeard's diction is beautiful.

>implying beauty in language automatically means sounding like a cringy pretentious hipster.

They're not the same anon. The pretentious fedora wearer speaks in a repugnant manner. It is not in any way aesthetic.

>>7615845
I never blamed the language itself (i even extolled good prose). I blamed us (including me) for how we use it. I am inept. I agree. But I'm looking for a way out of this ineptitude.

>>7615855
ok but this whole post reeks of euphoria
>wanting to write in outdated vernacular
Why is your question not, how do I write entertaining books?

>>7615661
I just resolve this by talking kind of like DFW, switching registers constantly between slang and erudition to throw people

>>7615855
Your prose remains dull. Dreary dreary. Blah blah.

>>7615867
>euphoria
fuck of back to church slaver moralist

>>7615867

In my first post, I made a clear distinction between sounding like "euphoria" and sounding "compelling".
I do not want to speak/write like outdated vernacular. Just want to improve on how articulate I am and speak in a clear pithy manner.

>>7615528
I love the word 'vernacular'. Like sesquipedlian or dyslexic, there's an inherent fuck you to it. It's great.

If you want to sound learned without sounding pretentious, focus more on saxonate roots and less on latinate. Incorporate more idioms into your speech and learn to play around with them a little. Vary your sentence structure and avoid rules of three.

A hue

>>7615880
triggered Slipknot fan
>>7615881
>and speak in a clear pithy manner.
m'lady. who gives a fuck? write something someone would want to read. that will put you miles ahead of the average /lit/izen who writes diary entries about their boring emotions

>>7615715
You obviously haven't studied linguistics.

>>7615855
Open a dictionary and find words that sound nice, and incorporate those words into your daily vocabulary. Don't use the words to one up people, but instead use them to fulfill your own needs. Practice them in your writing, speech, etc.

>>7615528
there is nothing that makes one dialect of a language better than another. the prescriptive rules that authors typically use to identify "bad english" are all absolutely arbitrary, and the idea that not following these rules is an error or makes it harder to understand is simply incorrect.

>>7615895
this

>>7615528
written language is obviously different from spoken language, but reading books may help.

I bet that there are people you know that actually speak in a nice way, you just haven't noticed it. Speaking well doesn't mean using big words, or even speaking correctly. Think about people who are fantastic at telling stories or jokes. There's a lot in intonation and body language. This comes naturally to most good speakers, but i guess you could train it as well.

In older works which I've read, the level of complexity in sentence structure is consistently higher and the vocabulary broader. I think the height of it is somewhere in the 1700s.

If you read enough of those works, the speech-patterns will "take hold" and you'll be able to "compose your own variations" - oddly enough the same thing happened to me with music of the Baroque era which is also the 1700s.

>>7616163
what do you mean by complexity in sentence structure?

>>7615895
>>7615993

You're right. I haven't. What's your point?

>>7616182
Long strings of needlessly complicated clauses strung together by inventive use of coordinating grammar.

Skip it

>>7616163
>If you read enough of those works, the speech-patterns will "take hold" and you'll be able to "compose your own variations"
Actually this. In particular, after obsessively reading Paradise Lost, my sentence structure became substantially more complex.

I wouldn't recommend it; most people speak in tiny bleats. If you try to compose some giant sentence, people either interrupt you before you're done because they got sick of waiting, or they don't follow you and get confused.

>>7615661
>people are getting dumber and verbal intelligence is plummeting.
got a source for that?

>>7616182
"Ungracious then as the task may be, I shall recall to view those scandalous stages of my life, out of which I emerged, at length, to the enjoyment of every blessing in the power of love, health and fortune to bestow; whilst yet in the flower of youth, and not too late to employ the leisure afforded me by great ease and affluence, to cultivate an understanding, naturally not a despicable one, and which had, even amidst the whirl of loose pleasures I had been tossed in, exerted more observation on the characters and manners of the world than what is common to those of my unhappy profession, who, looking on all thought or reflection as their capital enemy, keep it at as great a distance as they can, or destroy it without mercy." John Cleland, Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure, 1748