Word: dialectic
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...thirsty. Take it as a peace offering and an evidence from Boston, and its City Hall that Harvard still holds a high place in its esteem and respect, and a sporadic case of bad manners is not the standard of Harvard conduct. Even the ghastly humor, and tragic dialect of the Lampoon will not wring our winners or change our views...
...Dialect Difficult in Print...
...dialogue is, of course, all mountain dialect, collected by the author at great pains. This dialect is in Mr. Mackaye's words "a noble illiteracy," a language "more flexible than that of the average university graduate," showing "richness of thought and imagination." It is native speech "undiluted by the Ink of the academic or journalistic." Clearly a language meant to be spoken, not printed, and this makes it very difficult for the reader of the printed version to enter into the spirit of either language or play...
...German of the old 18th Century school who "never in all his life has worn a pair of trousers." Able in business, he has raised the Buddenbrooks to their important position. What if he is a rough diamond, who sometimes forgets himself and relapses into low German dialect before the fine guests...
...often asks: "How do authors collect dialect expressions?" The answer is, I think, usually, that they don't. Ernest Poole once told me that now that the saloon had vanished as a place in which to overhear conversations, the bus top was the ideal place for garnering a store of epithets, tender and vituperative. That may be; but I am practically certain that with John Weaver it is largely a question of things heard on the run, of the seeping in of idiom, of a certain eager understanding of the way the ordinary mind works. I doubt the accuracy...