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A Note on the Language The voices in Grace use the freedoms of a Caribbean-like speech to get away with murder. Elizabethan English—Shakespeare’s English—felt free to coin words, to discard the Latinate baggage of prefix and suffix when it got in the way, cheerfully to impress a noun into service as a verb, and to choose sense over syntax, always, should there be a choice. So with this invented dialect, which seeks the energy and economy of dialects in general. As that lovely man Anthony Burgess said, “Black English has the right idea.” ...

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