“Please wring out the rag into the bucket.”
“I need to wring this out before it drips.”
No one argues with those usages. What about “After he had wrung out the excess dye, he hung the fabric on the drying line?” Past perfect, so “wrung” is the proper form.
“She wrang out the clothes and hung them on the line.” To my ear, this is the correct past tense of “to wring.” But as it turns out, it is an archaism, one that comes through the Scots-Irish dialect into English, and that is fading out in most parts of the US. Can you use it in your writing? If it fits the character, the scene, and is understandable in context, sure. Will some people stumble over it unless they know the character speaks or thinks in dialect? Yes.
Ring, to ring, rang, rung. Those are for a bell. Wring, to wring, wrang, wrung. Those are for removing liquid from something. Sing, to sing, sang, sung. You can see where the dialect usage comes from. Dive, dove (as in “he dove into the cold water.”) Thrive, throve.
English changes, and the one-word perfect tense seems to be fading out for a lot of verbs. Will it be relegated to dialect, and “Dived,” “thrived,” “hived,” (for heave, hove) replace it? I see a lot of younger people automatically using -ed for the past tense rather than learning the older form. Part of it is that the full conjugation of most English verbs isn’t taught (teached?) in school. Part is that younger people don’t read older books outside of class, and so they assume that unusual-to-them verb forms are archaic, and out of common use. Or so I have been informed several times, by teachers and students both.
Am I going to stop using older words in my work, since their use is declining among the younger readership? I don’t think so. The meanings can be picked up from context, and sometimes older words carry a precision that I want for the story, or that better fits the characters. Overloading prose with delightful old words to the point of opacity, however, is to be eschewed. Unless again it fits a character, or someone is deliberately fogging the air.
What about clear dialects, like Lowland Scots*, or New England Yankee, or Louisiana Creole (different from Cajun), old-line Texan, or Slavic-flavored English? It depends on the genre and the writer. Some people can pull off lots of dialect, and some books are nothing but. Joel Chandler Harris’ The Tales of Uncle Remus is purely dialect, and very hard going until you tune your eye and mind’s ear. A Clockwork Orange manages it, but again, the reader has to work. There are a few other books I’ve read like that, where the author carefully catches the local rhythms and pronunciations. More often, it is better to have dialect, then ease out of it, keeping bits of the rhythm and a few words. Can the reader follow things? If no, then less is more.
Now, back to “wrang.” After much going back and forth with myself, I made a decision. What about all the British-English usages and spellings that appeared in the draft? Most were changed to American English. A few remained for clarity, likewise some words that also have compound forms. Would readers see the compound word and assume the meaning being used in the story? When in doubt, I found a different term, or left the word split in order to make things less confusing. “The story is known by everyman,” has a different sense than “The story is known by every man.”
Old forms, dialect usages, they can add interest and help with characterization. However, erring on the side of clarity for the reader is the important point. Something similar came up in a different novella, regarding “Uniate” versus “Eastern Rite Catholic.” Uniate is sometimes considered pejorative, but not by everyone. However, more readers would probably catch “Eastern Rite Catholic” and understand the difference, so I used that term.
*Which Lowland Scots? I heard at least five different versions between Melrose and Oban, and more on the way back to Edinburgh. Then there’s at least three Yorkshire variants between York, Hexham, and the Border proper.
Mad Genius Club 
24 responses to “Wrung or Wrang: Dialect, Archaisms, and the Writer”
Authors, if you’re going to do this, prithee, include a cheat sheet for your poor beta readers. Otherwise one of them might allow auto-corrupt to fix the obvious misspelling of “henp” to “hemp” (“n” and “m” are right next to each other, even) in your whole manuscript….
“Herbs and Empire“.
It is very annoying to be a certain age, and be told that the way I speak is archaic.
I guess I could be hip and use teenage slang. But I’d die of cringe.
Nothing becomes archaic faster than teenage slang. Personally, I learned plenty of my vocabulary from books, and see nothing wrong with passing that on to the next generation of readers.
These days they have built-in dictionaries in kindle, and don’t even have to figure out words like “vermiculated” and “hecatomb” from context!
I got a shining example of the short life of slang terms after my first year of college. (Circa 1971). When I started classes, “rip off or ripoff” implied a bad financial deal. Coming home, I was told that it was now slang for making the beast with two backs. AFAIK, that usage died out faster than Tom Eagleton’s chances of becoming Vice President. (Shoo, pterodactyls!)
A student once challenged my “uncool” way of speaking. I replied by doing the next five minutes or so of class in 1980s Valley Girl dialect. The students were appalled. Point made.
Heard a story of someone having to deal with a college roommate who had limited vocabulary.
“Boy, you look dishelved.”
(Angry) “What does that mean?”
“…Bedraggled?”
(Angrier.) “What does that mean?”
(Desperation.) “Like something the cat dragged in?”
(Still angry.) “Well you should have said so!”
If somebody said I was ‘dishelved’ I’d be puzzled, not angry. “I’m not supposed to be on a shelf in the first place.”
Now ‘disheveled’ is another matter. 😁
“If you run out of vocabulary, you run out of ability to speak.”
That’s a line from Send Me, by Joe Kent… something of a memoir in the guise of a biography about his late wife, who was a linguist in support of Special Ops. While the subject was fluency in Arabic, it’s no less true for fluency in English… a lack of vocabulary leaves people crippled and unable to think clearly or to express themselves.
English changes constantly, like any other living language, but it does not change independently from the people who speak it. Each of our choices in everyday communication, both formal and informal, drive the change in the overall language. Something falls out of usage only if we stop using it.
Choose wisely. Choose quixotically. But even if you fail to choose at all, you still have made a choice.
Theodore Dalrymple recounts how their different educations meant that his father could express his ideas where his uncle, wise and intelligent though he was, fumbled.
I like using words that add flavor, even if they are archaic (codswallop!) or British (ice lollies!) or Spanish (puta!) or made up (mazhor and trog!).
But I work very hard to make the word’s meaning clear via the sentence.
I’m very much in favor of strongly inflected verbs, and use them whenever they fit. And try to remind people of them.
I have nothing against new coinages, but please don’t debase the old ones.
I remember being told in a writing class in high school that you shouldn’t write someone’s dialog in a dialect/accent
and then being told the opposite in screenwriting cl;asses in college.
That … sounds about right. It is easy to mess up trying to catch dialect if you aren’t very familiar with how it has been done in the past, but trying to write a screenplay or script in standard English and also dialect for the same lines … The thought makes my head hurt.
I will continue to use shone instead of shined until the grammar police physically come to arrest me.
I admit to wanting to write a story sometime that the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect, just to use such wonders as “Make outen the light” or “Yonny’s tooth ouches him something wonderful” or “Come in Jacob, Mama’s on the table and Papa’s eaten himself full already.” The latter meaning that the dinner mother cooked is on the table so hurry if you want something to eat.
Oddly, “Turn outen the light” or “make outen the light” is something I heard from my maternal grandparents, one of whom grew up on the edge of “Dutch Country” in Texas in the 1910s-20s. The other came from a recently-Jewish family in New Orleans that still used bits of Yiddish and German in their Cajun-accented English.
Deliberately old-fashioned usages help convey that the reader is no longer in the fields we know.
You could also make your character someone who grew up in a military family that transferred all over the place. My Dad was Navy, so we stayed close to the ocean(s), and never left the US, but my vocabulary has bits of PA, VA, FL, CA, WI (where parents grew up), and, of course, words and phrases cribbed from JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis, TH White., and RAH.
I strongly dislike pandering to the ill-educated reader. Yes, I want my meaning to be clear to “everyman” and I will provide (subliminal) clues where I think them warranted, but we all acquired vocabulary from reading, so it’s well in the tradition of ordinary human learning. I value flavor too much to want to mealy-mouth my way around just the right word or sentence structure that a particular character would use. If the reader met the character in person, he’d have to figure it out on his own, so he’s lucky I even give him a clue.
I’ll hold up my end of the bargain by not going out of my way to be learnedly obscure just because I can be, just like I wouldn’t over-pepper the roast for his dinner, but that’s the only concession I’ll make.
Look at Manly Wade Wellman’s Silver John stories for dialect in the hands of a master. He uses not just “generic mountain” speech, but an entire technical vocabulary of haints and powers, and it’s a delight to read.
I love the way Wellman handled the dialect of the mountain people in his stories. But using it yourself can be risky. Not just in the sense of getting it wrong, but in dealing with editors and readers who don’t understand it and think you made it all up. Because everyone speaks English like they do and always did.
In my ideolect, it’s wring, wrung, have wrung. The past tense and past participle are identical, but it’s the past tense that assimilates to the past participle. I’m not sure that’s a proper weak verb. . . .
I have noticed dialect is not only pronunciation. It can also be usage.
US working class are direct and plain speaking. ‘I did this. I think this. This is how it works.’
White collar workers tend to be more circumspect, more indirect. ‘People say. It could be something like. It is possible. Perhaps someone should.’
Everything they say is couched in plausible deniability.
Things like that can also convey who or what someone is.
The (in)famous law enforcement passive: A call was received at six fifteen … the suspect was observed… a knife was dropped … the victim was found …