Shedding new light on the history of the English language, Strange Vernaculars explores how eighteenth-century British literature transformed the patois attributed to those on the margins into living symbols of the nation.
How strange to have the American vernacular put back in our mouths by this roundabout method.
Yet here were young artists expending huge amounts of time and effort to make charmingly strange stuff on the Internet for free, and adopting the vernacular of social media so effectively that their work slipped into the consciousness of millions of people who had little interest in art.
In exaggerated Black Vernacular English, the lyrics tell of Dan Tucker's exploits in a strange town, where he fights, gets drunk, overeats, and breaks other social taboos.
These representations of the vernacular made room for the "common people" within national culture, but only after representing their language as "strange". Such strange and estranged languages, even or especially in their obscurity, came to be claimed as British, making for complex imaginings of the nation and those who composed it.
Formby's was an unspun, unmanaged, un-genetically-modified popularity; he swam up into the cinema screen from the music hall: a vernacular phenomenon far from Hollywood or The X Factor – but to my eye exotic and strange, nonetheless.
Rather like Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane's recent Folk Archive exhibitions, this is a laudatory exploration of the vernacular, a gentle reminder that contemporary Britain can be beautiful and not a little bit strange, and for that a copy deserves to be placed in every bus station in the land.
These were strange words from a man who, with his wife, has designed a line of avant-garde furniture, Searstyle, based on vernacular elements of the suburban home, like winged bed-rest cushions and a line of china constructed from disowned dishes that they found at the Salvation Army and glued into ornate compotes.
