vernac
adj.— «There is the image, that to be successful, you have to speak English, wear a certain kind of clothes, frequent certain kind of places.” Says 14-year-old Rachna: “I can’t think of mixing with the vernac types. What do we talk about. And how?”» —“What are Ken and Barbie watching tonight?” Economic Times (India) Dec. 7, 1997. (source: Double-Tongued Dictionary)
Further reading
It was a dark and stormy night. So begins the long and increasingly convoluted prose of Edwards Bulwer-Lytton’s best-known novel. Today the annual Bulwer-Lytton Contest asks contestants for fanciful first sentences that are similarly...
After hearing our conversation about how dictionaries decide on a preferred pronunciation, and specifically about how to pronounce aioli, Vern from San Diego, California, wrote to say that a friend once made fun of him for pronouncing grimace with a...