Pynchonesque Dialect in Inherent Vice?

Inherent Vice

Thomas Pynchon

(Image from Wikipedia)

I could easily have become one of those Pynchon addicts. No, not the sort that he writes about. The kind that get addicted to reading his books. I read Gravity's Rainbow when I was a senior in college way back in the 1970s and got blown away by its complexity. I also found it very funny. I went on to read nearly each of his other works but never found any of the others quite as entertaining . . . until now. Inherent Vice is a very different type of Pynchon novel. It has all the same features, of course -- the drugs, the paranoia, the weirdly named characters -- but they fit together in a different way. A gestalt thing, I suppose, with the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

But I'm not yet up to doing any literary analysis of the book. I just have a tangential query stemming from the following freaky dialogue between a hippie named Denis (pronounced with a long "e," as in Venus) and the main character, Doc Sportello, who's also a hippie but works (if you can call it that) as a private investigator:

"So Doc, I'm up on Duncrest, you know the drugstore there, and like I noticed their sign, 'Drug'? 'Store'? Okay? Walked past it a thousand times, never really saw it -- Drug, Store! man, far out, so I went in and Smilin Steve was at the counter and I said, like, 'Yes, hi, I'd like some drugs, please?' -- oh, here, finish this up if you want."

"Thanks, all's 'at'll do 's just burn my lip."

Without being of a certain place and time (of America and of the sixties), a reader would likely find this dialogue rather difficult to follow. Denis's part of the conversation is perhaps not too hard. You only have to know that "far out" means something like "wow" . . . but what does Doc Sportello's reply mean? What has Denis just offered him? For someone who remembers the sixties, it's pretty clear. Denis has just offered Doc the butt end of a marijuana cigarette, only to have the offer turned down and the reason given. "Thanks" here means "Thanks, but no thanks," and the reason supplied by Doc is that the butt end is so short that the still burning marijuana cigarette is too little to get him high but just enough to burn his lip. In plainer English:

"Thanks, all that will do is just burn my lip."

Okay, that's clarified for anyone who might have been unsure. Now comes your turn to help me out. Here's my merely tangential query:

What does the "s" in "all's" mean?

Is it a contraction of "is," mistakenly carried over from the "all is" of, for example, "all's well"?

I don't dispute the fact that the expression used by Pynchon exists. I've also used the form "All's that'll do is . . ."

But where does the "s" come from?

Chaucer: "And thou shalt make hym couche as doth a quaille"

Chaucer's Clerk

"And thou shalt make hym couche as doth a quaille"

Canterbury Tales, "Clerk's Tale," line 1206

(Image from Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Page)

Two days ago, I quoted an email from my Aunt Pauline to my daughter, Sa-Rah, in which the word "quaille" was used:

I hatched about one hundred and fifty quaille for Velna . . . they sure are growing and she loves them . . . . these are birds.

I remarked on this spelling:

Quaille, as Aunt Pauline explains -- in case Sa-Rah doesn't know -- are birds. When my aunt says that she 'hatched' the quaille, she means that she used a brooder, a box-like structure often heated by lights. That word "quaille"' must be an Ozark variant for "quail," possibly a holdover from "quaille" in Middle English.

Trolling around the internet, I located this use of the word "quaille" in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, where it appears in his rendition of "The Clerk's Tale," specifically, in the "envoy" (i.e., concluding stanzas"), where the clerk advises wives not to be too submissive to their husbands, unlike the 'long-suffering' Griselda. See line 1206 of the passage below, which includes the word "quaille" in a conveniently interlinear arrangement providing both the Middle English and Modern English versions:

Ne dreed hem nat; doth hem no reverence, 1201
Fear them not; do them no reverence, 1201

For though thyn housbonde armed be in maille, 1202
For though thy husband be armed in mail, 1202

The arwes of thy crabbed eloquence 1203
The arrows of thy spiteful eloquence 1203

Shal perce his brest and eek his aventaille. 1204
Shall pierce his breast and also his neck-guard. 1204

In jalousie I rede eek thou hym bynde, 1205
In jealousy I advise also that thou bind him, 1205

And thou shalt make hym couche as doth a quaille. 1206
And thou shalt make him cower as does a quail. 1206

Chaucer was writing in the late 14th century, over 600 years ago, but as I've noted before, Ozark dialect has retained old meanings and old words, so it may even have kept some older spellings . . . or my aunt might have picked up this spelling of "quaille" from her high school Chaucer many years ago.

The Oxford English Dictionary dates this use by Chaucer to 1386, though it cites "Thou shalt make hym couche as doth a quaille" as line 1150 (OED Compact Edition, Volume 2, page 2381D).

The word "quaille" looks like a borrowed word, and a check of online dictionaries confirms this. In The Free Dictionary by Farlex, we find this: "Middle English quaille, from Old French, perhaps from Vulgar Latin *coacula, of imitative origin." The Online Etymological Dictionary is more informative, telling us that the word entered English around 1300, via Old French, which also provided the spelling "quaille":

c.1300, quayle, from O.Fr. quaille, perhaps via M.L. quaccula (cf. Prov. calha, It. quaglia, O.Sp. coalla), from a Gmc. source (cf. O.H.G. quahtala "quail," Ger. Wachtel), imitative of the bird's cry.

Interestingly, the word seems to have originated in the Germanic tongue despite coming into English by way of Latin and French.

And that's as far as I have time to investigate this unusual spelling, but if anyone knows other cases of the spelling "quaille" in English, whether Medieval or Modern, please let me know.

Expat Living: "In search of an Ozark dialect"

Buffalo River River Trail Overlook

"Splendid Isolation"

Near Steel Creek, Boston Mountains

(Image from Wikipedia)

My most recent column for the Korea Herald's Expat Living section has posted online, but finding it there would be a chore since the site doesn't allow for direct links to specific articles, so I'm reposting it here for your edification, entertainment, and convenience:

In search of an Ozark dialect

American folklorist Vance Randolph, famous for "Pissing in the Snow" and getting off Scot-free, not only collected and published those off-color Ozark stories for which he is known, but also did groundbreaking scholarly work in 1929 on the Ozark dialect.

On field trips throughout the Ozarks in the southern United States, Randolph encountered many unusual words and expressions, much as did I growing up in those same rough hills, but I no longer remain convinced of a specifically Ozark dialect, though I currently have time to reconsider as I show my family around these mountains for two weeks.

In my youth, I yearned to believe that we Ozarkers spoke our own dialect, and I imagined myself to have uncovered empirical evidence during the summer of '76, when I turned nineteen and was working as a chainman for a surveying crew in the wild Ozark woodlands.

Mostly, my job entailed lugging chain, a surveyor's level, hatchet, plumb-bob, hammer, laths, stakes, and other equipment through thickets where I had to cut lines, or up and down steep hollows which threatened havoc to our measurements.

One tough place stretched along the isolated hollow of a spring-fed river where our crew sought a corner marker to set up the theodolite, and where I learned an unfamiliar word. Scrambling for our bearings, we asked an old hillbilly if he knew where the marker, a metal spike driven into the ground, was located.

"Yeah," he replied, his face wrinkling with concentration, "but ye got to go antigogglin' over that thar hill to get thar."

Anti-what!? I thought. But it was pretty clear what the old man intended -- the way was not straight, as we had figured all along.

But, for assurance, when I arrived home that evening, I checked with my septuagenarian grandmother, who confirmed that the word meant "crooked."

I imagined that I had found support for Randolph's thesis, but I eventually stumbled across antigogglin' in other Southern states, and gradually inferred that the word characterizes Southern speech patterns, rather than any specifically Ozark one.

This conclusion has ruined my life, and I have taken to staying out nights drinking to drown my hillbilly sorrows in moonshine and to write guilt-ridden songs like "Day Breakin'":

Oh, all night, I been out drankin',
now mah head's as thick as clay,
So I 'spec' mah woman's waitin'
with some high-tone words tuh say,
But I'd need uhn extra drank
tuh help me face that judgment day!
-- an' another shot uh whiskey
jus' might warsh mah sins away.

Oh, the mornin' light is growin',
but mah head fades more like dusk,
An' mah wife could blast mah lies
away like wind'll blast a husk,
Yeh, the judgment that's a-waitin'
can be swift an' sure an' brusque
-- so, jus' one more shot uh whiskey,
save mah soul from gettin' cussed.

Oh, the crack uh dawn is creakin'
an' mah min' could crack in two
At the thought uh whut that scornful
woman's scorchin' speech can do
-- She got words as sharp as arrows,
an' she aims each one so true!
-- yet uhn extra shot uh whiskey
save me on this rendevous.

Oh, the sun is fully risen,
an' it burns mah eyes like mace,
Hence mah wife is surely wearin'
now her godforsaken face,
So I'll need a further drank
afore I step into that place!
-- an' uhn added shot uh whiskey
jus' may bring mah soul tuh grace.

Yeh, all night, I been out drankin,
thus mah head's as thick as clay,
So I 'spec' mah woman's waitin',
got them high-tone words tuh say,
Sure I need that extra drank
tuh help me on this judgment day!
-- now, that partin' shot uh whiskey,
may it warsh mah sins away.

Maybe if I just keep on writing such antigogglin' songs, I can create my own durgenal Ozark dialect, but I shall have to face my tetchous wife to do so.

Jeffery is a professor at Kyung Hee University and can be reached through his blog, Gypsy Scholar, at gypsyscholarship.blogspot.com -- Ed.

As for those who prefer not to reach me at my blog . . . well, too late now for regrets, but you can leave a comment expressing your dissatisfaction and informing me just how wrong I am -- a point that my Expat Living column will deal with next week, by the way.

Stay tuned...

Ozark Wordlist

Hillbilly Hot Dawgs?

Well, hit's right distink...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Okay, here's the long-promised post offering the Ozark hillbilly wordlist that has had all of you on the edge of your seats. That's "seats" as in "chairs," not "bottoms," for bottoms don't seem to have edges. Not that I'm an expert in the shape of bottoms...

But let's drop the human anatomy angle on impossibly axe-sharp asses, and move to the more humane etymology of possibly Anglo-Saxon asp-sharp sass expressed in Vance Randolph's imagined hillbilly monologue as an implicit retort to H.L. Mencken's claim that the American language has no dialects:

Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an' biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin' o' mother-wit, an' he aint nothin' on'y a tie-whackin' sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an' his least chaps a-bustin' out middles down in ol' man Price's bottom t'other ev'nin', a-whoopin' an' a-blaggardin' an' a-spewin' ambeer all over each an' ever', whilst thet 'ar pore susy hippoed woman o' hisn was a-pickin' boogers out'n her yeller tags, an' a-scrunchin' cheenches on th' punch'on 'ith a antiganglin' noodle-hook. D'reckly Lee he come a-junin' in all narvish-like an' tetchous, an rid th' pore ol' trollop a bug-huntin' -- jes' plum bodacious hipped an' ruinated her. They never did have nothin' on'y jes' a heap o' poke sallat an' a passel o' these hyar hog-mollies, but he must a got hisse'f a bait o' vittles some'ers, 'cause come can'le-light he geared up his ol' piedy cribber an' lit a shuck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol' durgen -- he should orter be bored fer th' simples! (Vance Randolph, "Is There an Ozark Dialect?" American Speech, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Feb., 1929), pp. 203-204)

What are we to make of this? As I admitted a couple of days ago, it goes beyond even my hillbilly ken in many of its particulars. However, Randolph has exaggerated a bit for effect by thickening the monologue with obscure expressions, making the Ozark 'dialect' appear even more distinct from standard American English than it probably was. But is it even a distinct dialect? Randolph doesn't define dialect in his article (not that I recall, but please correct me if I've misremembered), and I do wonder if Ozark hillbilly speech was different enough from the more general speech patterns of the American South to be distinctly Ozarkian. At the very least, this Ozark way of speaking would be a form of English shared with the Appalachian way of speaking.

Anyway, here's the wordlist, which I've made as complete as I could in the interest of perfect clarity. Some of these, even I couldn't find or recall, but a few readers might know. Other words will seem utterly obvious, and you might wonder why I bothered to include them, but keep in mind that I have an international readership (or like to pretend that I do):

a-blaggardin' = blaggarding: present participle, "misbehaving(?)" (cf."blackguard"?)

a-bustin' out = busting out: present participle, "hurrying"

aint = ain't: negative verbal contraction: "am not, is not, are not"

a-junin' = juning: present participle, "(?)"

allus: adverb, "always"

ambeer: noun, "Saliva colored by tobacco chewed or held in the mouth; tobacco juice"

an': conjunction, "and"

antiganglin': present participle, cf. antigoddle (antigoggle): verb, "to pursue a zigzag course" (Randolph, "A Fourth Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 8, No. 1 (Feb., 1933), p. 47)

'ar: adverb, "there"

as all git-out: adverb "utterly, entirely"

a-spewin' = spewing: present participle, "spitting forcefully"

a-whoopin' = whooping: present participle, "crying out in loud whoops" (whoop = "a loud cry of exultation or excitement")

bait: noun, "plentiful amount"

biddable: adjective, "following directions or obeying commands; docile."

bodacious: adverb, "outright, unmistakably"

boogers: noun, "pests as chiggers and ticks, fleas, bedbugs, and lice" (Jeffrey K. Barnes, "Arkansas Arthropods in History and Folklore," University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum)

bored: past participle, "insulted or imposed upon" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

bottom: noun, "bottom land"

can'le-light" noun, "candlelight = evening"

cheenches: noun, "bedbugs" (Jeffrey K. Barnes, "Arkansas Arthropods in History and Folklore," University of Arkansas Arthropod Museum)

clever: adjective, "generous or accommodating" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

cribber: noun, "a horse that has the habit of cribbing" (i.e., "a vicious habit of a horse; crib-biting. The horse lays hold of the crib or manger with his teeth and draws air into the stomach with a grunting sound")

danged: past participle, "euphemism for damned"

d'reckly: adverb, "directly, i.e., immediately (or soon thereafter)"

durgen: adjective, "countrified or old-fashioned" (Randolph and Nancy Clemens, "A Fifth Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec., 1936), pp. 315)

each an' ever': pronoun, "each other"

feller: noun, "fellow"

fer: preposition, "for"

geared up: past participle, "readied, prepared"

hipped: past participle, "(?)" [UPDATE: An anonymous reader has informed me of the following: "hipped" means exasperated, "put out", discountenanced. eg: "Brother, you look hipped -- is something amiss?" I notice Patrick O'Brian's characters used this word in the 18th century diction of the Aubrey-Maturin novels set in the era of the Napoleonic wars."]

hippoed: past participle, "hypocondriacally ill" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

hisn: possessive pronoun, "his" (from "his one"?)

hisse'f: reflexive pronoun, "himself"

hog-mollies: noun, "mostly North American freshwater fishes with a thick-lipped mouth for feeding by suction; related to carps"

hyar: adverb, "here"

'ith: preposition, "with"

jes': adverb, "just"

lit a shuck, fr. light a shuck: verb phrase, "to depart in haste" (Randolph, "A Third Ozark Word List," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Oct., 1929), p. 19)

middles: adverb(?), "in the middle of(?)"

mother-wit: noun, "common sense"

nary: adverb, "not any"

narvish-like: adjective, "nervous-like"

noodle-hook: noun, "fish hook(?)"

noways: adverb, "anyway"

o': preposition, "of"

ol': adjective, "old"

orter: modal verb, "ought to"

out'n: prepositional expression, "out of"

passel: noun, "A large quantity or group"

piedy = pied(?): adjective, "patchy in color; splotched or piebald"

plum: adverb, "completely"

poke = pokeweed: noun, "a tall North American plant (Phytolacca americana) having small white flowers, blackish-red berries clustered on long drooping racemes, and a poisonous root"

pore: adjective, "poor"

punch'on = puncheon: noun, "a type of wooden floor made from split logs" (Andrew Kuntz, The Fiddler's Companion (cf. "Everybody to the Puncheon"))

right: adverb, "completely, entirely"

sallat: noun, "salad"

scrunchin': present participle, "crushing"

seed: preterite, "saw"

sheer-crapper: noun, "sharecropper"

simples: noun(?), "stupidity(?)"

smidgin': noun, "a very small amount"

some'ers: adverb, "somewhere"

susy: adjective, "hopelessly inferior, and at the same time ludicrously complacent or conceited" (Vance Randolph, "A Possible Source of Some Ozark Neologisms," American Speech, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Dec., 1928), pp. 116-117)

tags: noun, "ears(?)"

tetchous: adjective, " easily irritated or made angry; short-tempered; peevish, irritable; testy: tetchy"

thet: demonstrative adjective, "that"

th': definite article, "the"

tie-whackin': present participle, "cutting railroad ties as one's job(?)"

trollop: noun, "a restless woman, a gad- about" (Randolph and Patti Sankee, "Dialectical Survivals in the Ozarks: III. Archaic Vocabulary," American Speech, Vol. 5, No. 5, (Jun., 1930), 424-430)

vittles: noun, "victuals = food"

work-brickel: adjective, "industrious"

yeller: adjective, "yellow"

Well, there they are, as promised -- and a lot more work it was than I'd expected, so I hope that my Herculean labors were not in vain.

Test next Tuesday...

"Is There an Ozark Dialect?"

Vance Randolph

Folklorist of the Ozarks

(Image from University of Arkansas Libraries)

In the February 1929 issue of American Speech (Volume 4, Number 3, page 203-204), Vance Randolph poses a question that is -- for me -- very interesting: "Is There an Ozark Dialect?"

He asks because he has noted that H.L. Mencken, in his influential book The American Language (New York, 1921), in chapter 5 on "The General Character of American English," had claimed:

There may be slight differences in pronunciation and intonation -- a Southern softness, a Yankee drawl, a Western burr -- but in the words they use and the way they use them all Americans, even the least tutored, follow the same line. One observes, of course, a polite speech and a common speech. But the common speech is everywhere the same, and its uniform vagaries take the place of the dialectic variations of other lands. A Boston street-car conductor could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running the slightest risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had picked up half a dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, fully naturalized.

Randolph's choice of Mencken was not simply due to Mencken's prominence as an expert on the 'American' language. Mencken was also an outspoken critic of American boobies and leveled his satiric wit at the 'fundamentalists' populating places like the Ozarks. Randolph, although not from the Ozarks, had married into an Ozark family, fallen in love with the region, and taken it upon himself to defend the 'uniqueness' of its inhabitants.

In 1929, therefore, having spent some years crisscrossing the region, seeking out its more isolated locales, he published his article, merely two pages, asking "Is There an Ozark Dialect?" As a way of answering his own question, he composed the following monologue of what an old 'residenter' of "the more isolated parts of the Ozark highlands" might say:

Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an' biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin' o' mother-wit, an' he aint nothin' on'y a tie-whackin' sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an' his least chaps a-bustin' out middles down in ol' man Price's bottom t'other ev'nin', a-whoopin' an' a-blaggardin' an' a-spewin' ambeer all over each an' ever', whilst thet 'ar pore susy hippoed woman o' hisn was a-pickin' boogers out'n her yeller tags, an' a-scrunchin' cheenches on th' punch'on 'ith a antiganglin' noodle-hook. D'reckly Lee he come a-junin' in all narvish-like an' tetchous, an rid th' pore ol' trollop a bug-huntin' -- jes' plum bodacious hipped an' ruinated her. They never did have nothin' on'y jes' a heap o' poke sallat an' a passel o' these hyar hog-mollies, but he must a got hisse'f a bait o' vittles some'ers, 'cause come can'le-light he geared up his ol' piedy cribber an' lit a shuck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol' durgen -- he should orter be bored fer th' simples!

Now, I gotta admit that this 'dialect' is beyond my 'ken' in some of its details (and Randolph has exaggerated a bit for didactic purposes), but in the general tenor, I can follow it, for my Granma Hodges and 'Granpa' Archie -- the man that she married after losing my Granpa Hodges to a tree-felling accident -- both spoke something like this.

Actually, I recall a point that Randolph doesn't thematize. Both Nora Hodges Dillinger and Archie Dillinger, who came from isolated parts of Fulton County and lived together on a farm at the end of a dirt road, used the inflected form "ye" for "you" in much of their speech. For example, they might say something like:

If I'd knowed y'as a-gon' ter do thet, I'd a-tol' ye not ter do it.

Translation (if required for some):

"If I'd known you were going to do that, I'd have told you not to do it."

Granma Hodges was born in 1895, and Archie in 1899 -- if I rightly recall. My kinfolk might correct me if they happen across this post, but I'm reasonably sure that those two could have spoken this sentence.

As for the long monologue from Randolph, a little glossary might help, so I'll attempt to supply one tomorrow if I have time. I might not be able to that soon, for I'm off on a two-day retreat with the other Kyung Hee University faculty and won't return until tomorrow evening (i.e., Friday evening, August 24th, 2007, Seoul time).

Meanwhile, amuse yourselves identifying (or guessing at) word meanings...

Lost and Found: Excerpts from my Article...

Communication Functions

English at times looks so foreign...

(Image from Wikipedia)

I have finished writing my article, just a short one of seven pages because I'm presenting it at a conference and have only about 20 minutes for reading it.

For the sake of any readers who might possibly be interested, I'll post some excerpts, which will pretty quickly reveal the middling level of this anecdotal essay. Here's introduction to my article, which I've titled "Finging Myself Lost in Translation":

As the title that I have chosen implies, I often find myself lost in translation. I am not especially good at foreign languages, so I have had to struggle a great deal to learn them well enough even for basic translation purposes, which is somewhat ironic since my scholarly career has required me to translate passages from such various languages as Hebrew, Greek, Coptic, French, German, and that exotic language, Old English. Lately, I have even spent some time trying to make sense of the obscure Middle English text Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Even the Early Modern English of John Milton's Paradise Lost can pose problems for my limited linguistic abilities. This paper maps out the rather circuitous route that some of my linguistic wanderings have taken me.

One Ozark friend of mine who's read through the entire paper as one of my proofreaders suggests that I "might be overdoing the self-deprecation" a bit here in my opening remarks, but as I told him, what I've said happens to be true.

I blame my tiny left Heschl's gyrus.

Anyway, along that circuitous path adumbrated in my introduction, I note an instance of my experience as a sociolinguistic misfit in the greater American society:

We Ozarkers also used ordinary words in unusual, archaic ways, for example, "stout" in the older sense of "strong" rather than its contemporary American meaning of "fat," a difference that occasioned a number of embarrassing linguistic missteps for me when I left the Ozarks for university, for in the campus gym where I exercised and played basketball, I happened to call some rather powerfully built bodybuilders "stout," which they took to mean that I was calling them "obese." Some of the female athletes whom I occasionally played basketball with also took none too kindly to the term. Eventually, I learned.

To be precise, I learned to change my way of speaking, to standardize my English, and I don't consider this a 'bad' thing, for a writer needs to develop a broad range of voices, but I often thought that my dialect had set me back at the onset of my university years. Perhaps it did, at the beginning, but I've come to see that my connection to archaic meanings of English words, and some archaic words themselves -- such as those noted in yesterday's post -- can serve to remind me of how people used (and use) their language, integrating rather than separating meanings, as I observed in an even earlier post, "Do ye ken it?". Which brings me directly to my conclusion:

Now, this may seem like a minor point, but it is nonetheless an important matter for interpretation, and also for translation. If I am working with some obscure Middle English text, for example, and encounter, say, the word "ken," then I ought to recall what the old hillbilly said and thus consider that this word may combine two or more of its meanings rather than express merely one of them. More generally, I should keep in mind that dialects of English often preserve archaic meanings, and even old forms that can, as with the word "pennywinkle," help us make scholarly judgements about puzzles even so distant as in Old English. And personally, I find rather satisfying the discovery that my own dialect of English, which had posed some stout difficulties for me when I first entered university, should currently prove so useful at this later, more scholarly stage of my learning, for I have come to realize that although I may have started off lost in translation, in this latter day translation, I have surely found myself.

And you now understand the logic behind the wording of my paper's title...