Even those who preferred the vernacular, however, saw themselves as heirs and contributors to a European as much as a local inheritance.
Eventually she got a table in the mode she prefers: a vernacular vocabulary customized in an unconventional way.
This photograph of the newly identified species of monkey Cercopithecus lomamiensis – thank God science still keeps the Latin language alive in its rules of nomenclature, although if you prefer the vernacular it's called the lesula – is a heartbreakingly beautiful portrait.
Seated at a desk tucked behind the billiards table, he wrote and rewrote in longhand such masterpieces as "Huckleberry Finn," often beseeching his editors to stop cleaning up his language and restore the earthier vernacular he preferred.
Indeed, the Museum of American Folk Art eschews the label, as do many collectors and gallery owners, preferring terms like "vernacular" or "self-taught," which potentially embrace everyone from impoverished 18th-century quiltmakers to middle-class Sunday painters.
I was made to constantly defend my sexuality and my way of life, or answer questions about why I preferred to use African American vernacular English when I was so "articulate".
