Most writers pride themselves in the mastery of their written language. Words strung together to create a world accessible to the reader. The nuns of Our Lady of the Foothills taught their students the proper spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation with the aid of a yardstick. Mistakes in orthography were punished as ruthlessly as the Inquisition seeking out heretics, however the sisters didn’t recognize the shift in the language for the children of the 60s.
Isn’t became ain’t. What was replaced by huh. Fuck could be used as a noun, adjective, verb, and adverb. No one has ever replaced ‘and or but’ with fuck, although George Carlin came close.
Marsha, the woman across the aisle from our store in the diamond exchange, constantly bemoans the lack of couth in the spoken language of New Yorkers.
“Animals.”
She is right and I avoid the lexicon of bad words in my writing. It’s one thing to be vulgar and another to know when to be vulgar, however a greater problem has arose in my writing style, for a French painter, Tristam Dequatremare, commented on my story about choosing the young Jacques Negrit for the door of the Bains-Douches in 1982.
“SOUVENIRS /SOUVENIRS! PETE, send me your texts when there’s some french in it before editing , your orthography is awful.”
I agree with Tristam. My writing is an abyss of malpracticed English, but I love moidering da Queen’s language.
Apres tout je suis americain.
By the way.
Tristam’s paintings.
Adorable.
