The Beauty of a Battered Language:
Finley Peter Dunne (1867 – 1936) once quipped, “When we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy.”
Nearly a century later, we’re still joyriding over words, backing up, running them down, and taking them for new spins. That’s the charm of language. It evolves, adapts, reinvents itself with every generation, every meme, every conversation.
English is a patchwork quilt stitched together from other tongues, and it thrives on reinvention. Every generation takes a wrench to it, loosens a few bolts, and drives off in a retooled version. Sometimes it sputters, sometimes it backfires, but it’s always moving.
Words once considered lowbrow are now standard. And consider that “selfie” entered the dictionary in 2013. Shakespeare invented words we still use today. Slang born on TikTok seeps into everyday conversation. The Oxford comma has had to fight for its life. It’s also how we come up with words like y’all and yous.
Bankers Brogue
As a writer, I’m fascinated by language and linguistics—how words bend, shift, and take on local color.
After hearing the Ocracoke brogue —a uniquely American dialect—after visiting the Outer Banks, NC island for years, I worked bits of it into my novel Love and Other Incurable Ailments. The cadence and vocabulary carry a flavor that I love listening to.
For example, Serenity, the main character, asks a local boy about the strange dialect she hears from two elders on the island. This is what Raf tells her:
“That’s the Banker’s Brogue. Some o’ the dit dot get warshed out in the hoi toid, but the creek gits slick cam every whipstitch. It’s been a whit since I took a scud across the beach. Drime, that’s not roight…”
For years, the unique island dialect was mocked as bad English or bad grammar, and something to be corrected or ironed out. Today, it’s recognized as an American linguistic treasure, a blend of old English, Irish and Scottish roots combined with coastal isolation that created something one-of-a-kind. It’s now taught in the local school as part of cultural heritage.
So what was once ridiculed now carries pride, proving that language isn’t just about rules. It’s about identity, history, and the way words can anchor us to a place and a people.
That’s the magic of dialects: they don’t just tell a story, they are a voice that belongs uniquely to a place and its people.
Ocracoke Brogue to Gen Alpha Slang
Going back to Dunne’s quote, no writer can ignore the slang tumbling out of millennial, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha mouths. Researching slang, including Southern sayings, is the fun of writing a contemporary novel. I discovered words that didn’t exist a decade ago as well as familiar words that now mean something entirely different. Every sus, yeet, and rizz is a reminder that language isn’t a museum artifact.
So, we continue backing over the English language, denting it as some people scream that we’re flattening it. Yet, it keeps rolling along, brighter and noisier than ever.
Maybe we should applaud the fact that English, clumsy and colorful as it is, is still very much alive. Our world has more diversity than any other time in human history. Our individual language becomes a sort of personal marker that signals to others who we are and how we wish to be perceived.
It’s not the death of language; it’s simply a shift.
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Love and Other Incurable Ailments is available to preorder from Regal House Publishing, a women-owned, independent, traditional publisher. If you are interested, please order from them!
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