A little Runyon retrospective, in which Gopnik has some fun aping the author's characteristic idiom, but more important, shows a powerful understanding of what makes that idiom so pungent: "The usual things is to insist that Runyon had an amazing 'ear' for natural idiom, but, as Cy Feuer points out, Runyon's dialogue is essentially unplayable, to far removed from any human idiom to be credible in drama. [...] As far as one can tell, Jewish crooks of the period really did speak a surprisingly elaborate and cautious diction. They didn't speak like Runyon characters, but they tried to speak high for the same reason that they polished their shoes and tipped their hats and dressed in suits: fancy was classy. This tendency still shows in Sinatra's recorded speech, which, when made for public consumption, is extremely 'high', a Hoboken boy's idea of a class act. [...] One wonders, watching 'Speed-the-Plow', whether studio heads ever really talked like this, until one grasps that Mamet's aim is to capture not their voices but their souls, the inner monologue of stilted present-tense self-justification, the slightly formal tone we all use inside when arguing in our own defense. Runyon's essential discovery was that the right way to get the soul of street-speakers was not to dress their language down but to dress it up. As much as American slang breaks toward the interrupted, partial, and incomplete, it also bends toward the fancy, overformal, and elaborate. Mamet gets this best, but Runyon heard it first." Consider the implications of this for Brian Michael Bendis; for David Foster Wallace. I consider that on some level, when you dress that street-speaker up, fastforward him seventy years into the body of his distant cousin, the educated Canadian workingclassman, and send that kid off to grad school--some part of Runyon's innovation, Gopnik's astute observation, has gone into my own strange idiom.

(New Yorker.) ( )