vernac
adj.— «“They wanted a famous name from Mumbai to put on the marquee. I even organised that,” she said, “I got them a star performer, but they didn’t like him, said he was too vernac.” “Meaning what?” “Meaning he did serious theatre and gave interviews in Hindi and Marathi. They dumped him, and got me someone else instead.”» —“Sponsorship for the theatre of the absurd” by Kishore Singh Business Standard (India) Oct. 24, 1998. (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...
Science journalist Laura Spinney’s new book Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global (Bookshop|Amazon) shows how lots of languages as diverse as Hindi, Italian, and English all stem from a single prehistoric ancestral tongue. A basic word for the...