{"id":2556,"date":"2026-05-18T16:02:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/?p=2556"},"modified":"2026-05-18T16:02:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T20:02:10","slug":"more-pynchonian-eye-dialect","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/more-pynchonian-eye-dialect\/","title":{"rendered":"More Pynchonian eye dialect"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/ing-now-with-100-more-enregisterment\/\">Twelve years ago I wrote a bit about Pynchon&#8217;s use of eye dialect in his underappreciated 2013 novel <em>Bleeding Edge.<\/em><\/a> In that book, the dialogue of Californian woman (Vyrna McElmo) is stylized so that her\u00a0<em>-ing<\/em>s are spelled <em>-een<\/em>, presumably denoting [in]; e.g., &#8220;I\u2019m still, like, <strong>vibrateen<\/strong>&#8220;. I am now working through\u00a0<em>Vineland\u00a0<\/em>(1990). In that book, another Californian, DEA agent Hector Zu\u00f1iga&#8217;s dialogue features a different eye dialect take on the same variable: they are spelled <em>-\u00edn<\/em>, presumably denoting something similar, as in the following passage (p. 28):<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>All of you are still children inside, liv\u00edn your real life back then. Still wait\u00edn for that magic payoff. [&#8230;] Rill puzzl\u00edn.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I wonder if there&#8217;s a prosodic difference between (Caucasian) McElmo and (Latino) Zu\u00f1iga&#8217;s renditions of <em>-ing <\/em>in Pynchon&#8217;s mind, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Twelve years ago I wrote a bit about Pynchon&#8217;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\u00a0-ings are spelled -een, presumably denoting [in]; e.g., &#8220;I\u2019m still, like, vibrateen&#8220;. I am now working through\u00a0Vineland\u00a0(1990). In that book, another &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/more-pynchonian-eye-dialect\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;More Pynchonian eye dialect&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language","category-sociolinguistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2556"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2557,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2556\/revisions\/2557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wellformedness.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}