"Americans," he laments in "Talking Back, Talking Black," "have trouble comprehending that any vernacular way of speaking is legitimate language".
Soldiers and psychopaths, gods and gangsters, icons and executives parade through his dramas — all, in their unique, vernacular way, eloquent in their unknowing.
A regular at the bar was a woman, no longer so young, whom Deford called, in his breezy, vernacular way, "a lady of the evening".
It is about better articulating English feeling in a progressive, open and modern yet vernacular way – if such a thing can be done – and then reuniting it with practical, achievable politics.
And I don't mean that in a bad, loose vernacular way, I mean you can address any subject in a song now.
The way she told it was in a stripped-down vernacular style.
What's more, as he retreated from the world, his writing grew increasingly solipsistic and hermetic, his mastery of the vernacular giving way to more and more abstract language.
He has had brilliant imitators, most notably Raymond Carver (a debt first pointed out to me by my college advisor, John Hollander), but his musical repetitions and his love of the vernacular, the way he gets you to enjoy the phatic fuzz of American talk these have never been surpassed.
Much of this music hasn't seeped into the popular vernacular the way, say, Seeger's version of We Shall Overcome did.
Nothing I've seen on canvas or in a museum has blended pop and abstraction with a stylized black vernacular the way that he did.
What they share is a footing in the American vernacular and a way of disguising the contortions of their craft.
