Month: May 2026

More Pynchonian eye dialect

Twelve years ago I wrote a bit about Pynchon’s use of eye dialect in his underappreciated 2013 novel Bleeding Edge. In that book, the dialogue of Californian woman (Vyrna McElmo) is stylized so that her -ings are spelled -een, presumably denoting [in]; e.g., “I’m still, like, vibrateen“. I am now working through Vineland (1990). In that book, another Californian, DEA agent Hector Zuñiga’s dialogue features a different eye dialect take on the same variable: they are spelled -ín, presumably denoting something similar, as in the following passage (p. 28):

All of you are still children inside, livín your real life back then. Still waitín for that magic payoff. […] Rill puzzlín.

I wonder if there’s a prosodic difference between (Caucasian) McElmo and (Latino) Zuñiga’s renditions of -ing in Pynchon’s mind, though.

Linguistics beach reads

Since I started grad school, I have made a practice of reading books, and pop-science linguistics books in particular. I genuinely think I’ve gotten a lot out of it over the years. Let me make a few recommendations for your summer beach reading, focusing on lighter fare.

  • The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code (Margalit Fox, 2013) is a breezy take on the decipherment of Linear B, with particular emphasis on crucial early work done by Brooklyn College professor Alice Kober, who was in heavy correspondence with amateur Michael Ventris, who announced the decipherment just eighteen months after her untimely death at age 43. (Ventris himself died even younger, at 34, in a car accident that some think a concealed suicide.) The Linear B saga is a neverending source of interest, and Fox is both good on the drama (she used to write the obituaries in the Times) and the linguistics (she has a master’s degree from Stony Brook).
  • Chinese Characters across Asia: How the Chinese Script Came to Write Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese (Zev Handel, 2025) talks amateurs through the history of writing in East Asia, summarizing his much more technical 2019 book on the same topic for a non-linguistic audience. 
  • Patterns In The Mind: Language And Human Nature (Ray Jackendoff, 1994) is my favorite of Language Instinct-alikes. It is focused more or less on selling the idea of UG to normies, and on those terms, it succeeds mightily. 
  • Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (Gretchen McCulloch, 2019) does a good job summarizing disparate threads in the sociolinguistics of computer-mediated language with just enough humor to lighten the mood.
  • Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Noam Chomsky, 1987) is the text of five lectures given to a lay audience in Nicaragua, illustrating the core ideas of the generative program. Most of the examples are based on comparing the syntax of English and Spanish, and the book is easily the most accessible thing Chomsky has written (and far more relevant to current thinking than, say, the equally-accessible Syntactic Structures). 

I of course welcome other suggestions in the comments section.