First off, I have never read a story written in almost entirely African American vernacular. One thing that was very dramatic to me is listening to black vernacular I can usually understand but reading it was so much harder to understand. It was like my brain was working twice as hard to gain the concept. This story used a lot of words that were broken off for lack of a better term. All the apostrophe's in the article can attest to that. Many of the words are missing the last letter when written that I don't think is as pronounced and noticable when African American vernacular is heard rather than read. The words used are common usage that would be heard in an everyday conversation. There are no "scholarly" or "big" words. I use those terms loosely only to prove my point about word choice because I don't think you can actually classify words that way.
I think our society today would say this lady perhaps sounds "uneducated". I am not entirely sure what classifies a person as sounding "uneducated" and this is something I hope to explore further this semester. The social stigmas placed on a person simply because of their use of language is fascinating.
One quote from Mark Twain himself that I found very interesting was, "sobered my manner and my speech". At first I took this to mean he felt like she was "dumbing him down" or that he would need to use smaller words so she would understand. It could mean he felt brought back to reality with her language choice. One thing I would like to explore more is how we classify people based on their use of our language because Mark Twain seemed to subtly classify her.
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