Page:They Knew What They Wanted.pdf/19



I don’t know what value a personal preface can have, in a book which has no didactic or otherwise serious purpose to fulfil, unless the author avails himself of the opportunity it offers him for the listing of his alibis. I have the usual author’s alibis in the usual round numbers, of course, and I should like to list them all and to dwell fully upon every one. With heroic self-restraint, however, I am confining myself to a pair, only.

The first concerns the dialect which the characters of this play speak and of which I have to say that I have considerately elected to print it legibly rather than phonetically because I much prefer the reader’s imaginative coöperation to any laboured and vision-destroying phonetics that I might have invented. I have tried (with as much consistency as seemed quite convenient, the reader’s and my own sloth considered) to suggest inflection, intonation, and pronunciation through the minimum amount of misspelling.

The native American characters of the piece speak Californian, a language which may best be described as not very good American in which the “R” is less dynamic than in certain middle-western pronuncia-