Are you Flannery O'Connor?

[a question for the ages]

[first posted: March 24, 2025, 7:14 p.m. Pacific time]

Tomorrow, March 25, 2025,¹ a treasured friend² reminds me, is the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Flannery O’Connor, so what better excuse do I need to post the celebrated³ Flannery O’Connor Flowchart,⁴ with the accompanying celebrated⁵ reminder that phonetically rendered dialogue is a dicey proposition that can easily come across as condescending, classist, or considerably worse, plus it’s also, as a rule, a pain in the ass to read.

Also also, “should’ve” is a lovely thing to type.⁶

If you wish to render on the page the voice of someone who speaks what might reasonably neutrally be called nonstandard English,⁷ I urge you to consider relying on eccentric word choice and perhaps stilted or otherwise unusual sentence construction rather than an endless stream of dropped g’s for anyone who lives south of the Delaware Water Gap, or a lot of⁸ “zis” and “zat” for, say, French tourists in Manhattan.

But on the other hand, because isn’t there always another hand, or at least an other hand, if you’ve got the nerve to attempt something like this:

“She would of been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”

and can pull it off as dazzlingly as Flannery O’Connor does in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”:

More power to you.

Happy one hundredth birthday, Flannery O’Connor!

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In truth, I did simply want to get in a quick post this evening because I’m reminded that as this series has just achieved its one-year milestone,⁹ it also means that many of you who generously and virtually sight-unseen signed on as contributing subscribers when I was just getting started a year ago have also renewed your subscriptions, and I can’t even begin to describe how grateful I am for that. As I do like to note: You don’t have to pay to read what I’ve written here, but those of you who can (and do) pay (a) make it possible for me to do what I do, and (b) make it possible for others to share in the fun. Thank you hugely.¹⁰

Sallie, who is currently having her pre-sleep¹¹ nap on a newly remade¹² bed, would thank you, I’m sure, if she were awake.¹³ She is, however, susurrating most prettily.

1. Or as you might well write it were you not a citizen of the United States: 25 March 2025.

2. I once promised this treasured friend that I’d do a ’stack post that was twenty-five words long with twenty-five footnotes. I still owe him that.

3. At least by some.

4. Which of course you can find on p. 13 of Dreyer’s English, available wherever better (and presumably considerably worse) books are sold.

5. See note 3, above.

6. So is “I’d’ve.”

7. In addition to not being Flannery O’Connor, I’ll bet that you’re also neither William Faulkner nor Zora Neale Hurston.

8. Or any, for that matter.

9. I typed and then deleted “such as it is,” because false modesty ill becomes me.

10. Also, there are nearly one hundred entries in this A Word About . . . series to date, and they’re all there for your scrolling amusement and edification and to pass the time between new entries.

11. As much as I generally favor closing up prefixes to their main words hyphenlessly, the result is not always easy to read, so if you, on occasion, wish, judiciously, to preserve the hyphen in one of these mini–Frankenstein’s monsters,* particularly one that you can’t find in the dictionary, then that’s OK. Don’t go to that well too often, though.

*En dash alert, natch.

12. But “re-made” would look silly.

13. Thirteen footnotes. I’m not displeased.