Yesterday we were jawing about how we speak, each in our own weird way. And if you’re bred in a boring locution location, how to keep listeners from dozing at your prosing.

I explained how my boyhood dialect, affectionately labeled “Panicky Polite,” bleached speech to blah. Oh to be Mark Twain, Hardy, Faulkner, Dickens or others who seemed soaked in a rich vernacular they could replicate. I’d have settled for Uncle Remus, though he’s outlawed today. Why we woke folk are incapable of reading in context bewilders me, retrospectively rebuking the racism, sexism, jingoism or other isms of a bygone age. Of course, we can enjoy Huck Finn or The Merchant of Venice or wilting bel canto heroines without endorsing the lamentable norms of their moment! Every generation has its grotesque blind spots; ours too, though we don’t know yet what they are (which is why they’re called blind spots).

I read for manner, not matter, to spy a potential playmate behind what they’re saying. Reading for me is speed dating – do I want to pal with this maker? God keep me from dullards, however lofty their ideas. (No, Herr Hegel, sorry, I can’t, I’m booked.) Literary style discloses us, as gesture, expression, dress, eye-glint do in person. We sense whether we’re going to like someone before they open their mouth – they’ve got this “way” about them.

Since my writing is a conversation with myself – with “you” playing “me” – I try to make myself in words the kind of person I’d cotton to in person. My models are writers with whom I’m in love. What do I like about Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Dickens, Trollope, T. S. Eliot, Santayana, to name a few? What in them speaks to me? I do not analyze literature but myself reading literature. What might I filch to doll myself up?

Montaigne and Thoreau taught me bro-talk; I really want to hang with them. Austen, Dickens, Trollope taught me funny; Santayana a sardonic, world-weary distance. Emily Dickinson and T.S. Eliot tutored me in anguished depths: it hurts how intrepidly they invade their interiors.

Shakespeare taught me… well, pretty much everything.

First, no bullshitting – and not much throat-clearing. His characters, bang, tell you what’s on their minds. As does their maker in his sonnets: he bleeds and we do not recoil. Amazing.

Second, never a dull phrase, if you can help it. Make your language lush and luscious, even at the risk of overdoing. I always smile at that moment early in Hamlet when Horatio observes it’s sunrise: “Look,” he tells his rough-hewn soldier buddies,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published the morn in russet mantle cladWalks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

What the – !!! Where does Horatio get off talking like that, so fancy, without a hint of irony? It’s impossibly out of character – and wrong for its moment. And so wonderful. Shakespeare opts for our enjoyment every time, even if it makes him look dumb – he loves us that much.

Third – this is a little inside the beltway – he saddles, bridles, and gallops metaphors like a maniac: you pant keeping up. Think of that moment from Macbeth (though such lexical extravagancies are legion):

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAnd Pity, like a naked new-born babe,Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim, horsedUpon the sightless couriers of the air,Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,That tears shall drown the wind.

Huh? Such a perplexing jumble of analogies should get its author had up for literary malpractice – yet it works! We get it – even if we don’t quite – such audacity – such verbal athleticism!

Bless my professors.