Sunday, November 7, 2010

River of Gods Vernacular

So I am nearing the end of this imposing thick novel, and something just became apparent to me. At first, I know I just sort of read over this and didn't dwell much on it but now I'm fascinated. Has anyone noticed the vernacualr/slang used for certain words, people, etc.? Words like "noo" (for new) and "clowthz" "holidaze" "Grrls" "Boyz". What seems to be interesting is that McDonald only uses these words in certain places, and since I've really just begun to notice I'm wondering if this is meant to be a representation of the younger generations/items etc in the story or what. I know that I can recall Najia and Tal using these phrases, and Shiv referred to "grrls" and "boyz."
It sort of cracks me up because it reminds me of those goofy kitten posters on fb and whatnot that say things like "rap kittenz rapz 4 cheezburgerz" Haha. Just wondering if anyone else got a rise out of this. I'm really hoping that McDonald isn't making some statement about our generations' susceptablity and making a predicition that these words will be common use in language in the near future.

4 comments:

Jenny Strack said...

I didn't notice it, but I will definitely go back and check. I laughed at the lol catz reference you made though, they're so cute!

Katy said...

I didn't notice either. That's pretty amusing. Gotta love science fiction writers and their weird take on everything.

Courtney said...

I noticed this a bit, but it seemed to fit well with the story so I didn't pay much attention. I could see these words or words like them becoming a part of common language use. Some of them already are in some circles.

Anonymous said...

I think you're dead on with it being a representation of a younger generation. I took these words as English loans. Our language is the herpes of the linguistic world, so a lot of common English sayings tend to be ingested by other languages. The spellings are all phonetic, too, which makes sense; someone whose native language isn't English probably wouldn't know the standard spelling.

/linguist