"I write in American slang"
About this Quote
A flex disguised as a shrug: Spinrad’s “I write in American slang” plants a flag in a territory polite literary culture has often treated like a strip mall - useful, loud, vaguely embarrassing, and definitely not “serious.” The intent is both aesthetic and political. Slang isn’t just vocabulary; it’s tempo, aggression, humor, and social positioning. To claim it as a medium is to reject the idea that “proper” English is the neutral default and everything else is deviation.
In Spinrad’s context - a science fiction writer who helped push the genre toward sharper social critique - “American slang” signals an allegiance to the lived present over the museum of correct prose. SF is forever staging futures, but Spinrad’s line suggests the future will still be spoken by people with dirty jokes, regional inflections, and class-coded shortcuts. Slang is how language admits who has power, who’s excluded, who’s performing toughness, who’s trying to sound like they belong. Writing in it is a way of smuggling sociology into style.
There’s subtexted defiance here, too: against gatekeepers who treat genre writing as pulp and any “unrefined” diction as proof of intellectual thinness. Spinrad implies the opposite. If you can handle slang on the page without turning it into parody, you can capture the machinery of real conversation - persuasion, threat, desire, status - with a precision that formal prose often sands down. It’s not anti-literary. It’s anti-pretension, and quietly pro-democracy.
In Spinrad’s context - a science fiction writer who helped push the genre toward sharper social critique - “American slang” signals an allegiance to the lived present over the museum of correct prose. SF is forever staging futures, but Spinrad’s line suggests the future will still be spoken by people with dirty jokes, regional inflections, and class-coded shortcuts. Slang is how language admits who has power, who’s excluded, who’s performing toughness, who’s trying to sound like they belong. Writing in it is a way of smuggling sociology into style.
There’s subtexted defiance here, too: against gatekeepers who treat genre writing as pulp and any “unrefined” diction as proof of intellectual thinness. Spinrad implies the opposite. If you can handle slang on the page without turning it into parody, you can capture the machinery of real conversation - persuasion, threat, desire, status - with a precision that formal prose often sands down. It’s not anti-literary. It’s anti-pretension, and quietly pro-democracy.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Norman
Add to List
