The way she told it was in a stripped-down vernacular style.
Hoban calls it a "broken-up and worn-down vernacular", but it doesn't seem in need of fixing.
The call went out to modernists of many stripes, from the boldly experimental firm of Reiser & Umemoto of New York to Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studio in Greensboro, Ala., whose hands-on approach to pared-down vernacular houses earned him a MacArthur award.
The Irish monks introduced to the British speakers the custom of writing down the vernacular language at about the end of the 8th century; they adapted the clumsy Irish orthography for that purpose.
As she did in "Liars' Club," Ms. Karr combines a poet's lyricism and a Texan's down-home vernacular with her natural storytelling gift.
The entrant in the "New Lu" sweepstakes who generated the most buzz last year was Tift Merritt, a 28-year-old North Carolinian with a willowy soprano and an ear for down-home vernacular.
The farms, as they were known in the typically down-home vernacular of the day, were collectives of overeducated urban refugees, radical kids who'd reported the news or made the news, kids who were now worn out with the complications of the world.
"Uptown people talk about the park and the river and the 'airplane view,' which is not part of the vernacular down here".
Popular forms broke through in the Middle Irish period, though always mixed with archaizing forms; the backward-looking Irish scribes were never content to write down their own vernacular.
Ms. Kawai has the funky exquisiteness of the classic dollhouse vernacular down cold, from tiny pillows and emergency instructions to busy flight attendants and imaginatively attired, werewolf-wigged passengers (their faces are all photographs of Beatles) who are reading, tending computers and, in one case, drawing.
But her friendly, down-to-earth vernacular is well pitched for the 6- or 7-year-old reader.
