excerpt from an interview with...
George Saunders, one of my favorite contemporary authors.
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-05-17.htm
Part of your style is to play a lot with dialogue and with common verbal tics -- the use of "like," as in, "He was like: dang," or the use of the rising inflection at the end of a statement that's not a question, as in, "Because I want to?" Is that an avoidance of deficiencies?
Definitely. I didn't go to the greatest of schools as a young kid, and then I went to engineering school, and so my grammar is not the best. I'm not articulate in a conventional way, so I channel my energies into other things -- dialogue, for example -- where inarticulateness can actually convey passion, and, in doing so, becomes, in a perverse way, articulate. Unlike that last sentence.
There's an Orwell essay that I love, called "Politics and the English Language," in which he says that language is inherently political. So something like "like" is a sort of indicator of a larger societal dysfunction. What "like" does is allow you to join two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but associatively linked, without having to go to great lengths to make the connection. It's kind of an impressionistic device. You can say, "The truck was going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down, jerk?" I'm sure we stumbled across that sort of device because we needed it. It's meaningful. The same goes for euphemisms, which I love. When somebody takes great trouble not to say something, it's an incredible display. They can't say, "I'm dying." Instead they have to say, "The ongoing experience that has been my life is apparently not going to be quite as lengthy as was first suggested to me."
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/ba2000-05-17.htm
Part of your style is to play a lot with dialogue and with common verbal tics -- the use of "like," as in, "He was like: dang," or the use of the rising inflection at the end of a statement that's not a question, as in, "Because I want to?" Is that an avoidance of deficiencies?
Definitely. I didn't go to the greatest of schools as a young kid, and then I went to engineering school, and so my grammar is not the best. I'm not articulate in a conventional way, so I channel my energies into other things -- dialogue, for example -- where inarticulateness can actually convey passion, and, in doing so, becomes, in a perverse way, articulate. Unlike that last sentence.
There's an Orwell essay that I love, called "Politics and the English Language," in which he says that language is inherently political. So something like "like" is a sort of indicator of a larger societal dysfunction. What "like" does is allow you to join two thoughts that are grammatically distinct but associatively linked, without having to go to great lengths to make the connection. It's kind of an impressionistic device. You can say, "The truck was going so fast, like, I just went, like: Slow down, jerk?" I'm sure we stumbled across that sort of device because we needed it. It's meaningful. The same goes for euphemisms, which I love. When somebody takes great trouble not to say something, it's an incredible display. They can't say, "I'm dying." Instead they have to say, "The ongoing experience that has been my life is apparently not going to be quite as lengthy as was first suggested to me."