"My Life"
A T. D. Biography (of sorts)

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I write the way I talk and I talk like other small-town Texans who have studied Greek and Latin and taught literature for thirty years. I talk and write the best way I can but don’t go around correcting people. As Casey says in The Grapes of Wrath, “There ain’t no vice and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.” I’m no more a schoolmarm than Casey was a preacher. I don’t believe that “correct” and “incorrect” apply to language, there’s just stuff people say. What they say may in fact be grammatically correct but overly ornamented or otherwise nails-across-the-blackboard irritating. Yet I’m interested in the way people talk, in the sociology of language, how our usage defines us as a culture.

Good language is like an Edward Hopper painting, direct, unadorned, simple, and as original as possible--qualities rare enough nowadays to be considered collectors’ items. 

Tom Dodge Books
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