Dialogue Single Or Double Quotes

...The ever-blossoming additional clauses are most often the Narrator's idea of written language stapled awkwardly onto his knowledge of spoken language: 'Well, besides black hair, this doll has a complexion like I do not know what, and little feet and ankles, and a way of walking that is very pleasant to behold. Personally, I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her, because the way I look at it, the feet and ankles are the big tell in the matter of class, although I wish to state that I see some dolls in my time who have large feet and big ankles, but who are by no means bad. But this doll I am speaking of is 100 per cent in every respect, and as she passes, The Humming Bird looks at her, and she looks at The Humming Bird, and it is just the same as if they hold a two hours’ conversation on the telephone, for they are both young, and it is spring, and the way language can pass between young guys and young dolls in the spring without them saying a word is really most surprising, and, in fact, it is practically uncanny.' The naturally exuberant street language (“I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”) always gets topped off by self-conscious writerly gestures (“although I wish to state”; “by no means bad”; “is really most surprising”). The Narrator’s half-conscious knowledge that there are rules out there that you’ve got to respect leads him to overcompensate by respecting the wrong rules; that is, using formal diction where there ought to be vernacular idioms and vernacular idioms where there ought to be formal diction. So Runyon’s key insight into American slang is double: first, that street speech tends to be more, not less, complicated grammatically than “standard” speech; but, second, that slang speakers, when they’re cornered to write, write not just fancy but stiff. In prime Runyon, the two sounds—street ornate and fountain-pen formal—run together into a single argot and beautiful endless sentences: “This Meyer Marmalade is really a most superior character, who is called Meyer Marmalade because nobody can ever think of his last name, which is something like Marmalodowski, and he is known far and wide for the way he likes to make bets on any sporting proposition, such as baseball, or horse races, or ice hockey, or contests of skill and science, and especially contests of skill and science.” When Abe Burrows brilliantly recast Runyonese for Guys & Dolls, what he did instinctively was to scrub off the second, writerly patina and keep in the elaborate speech. This approach worked wonderfully onstage, where we easily accept a stylized dialogue, as we do with David Mamet now.

This was one instance in which the medical profession totally rejected something that they were not ready to accept because, in part, there was no framework for understanding the new concept. It was only later, when the causative agents were clearly identified through the work of Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, and Joseph Lister, that it became accepted that germs cause disease. Koch discovered that a microscopic agent was the cause of tuberculosis and showed this with total certainty, leading to a revolution in medicine. All of a sudden, science and technology seemed to hold tremendous power, once it was understood that so many diseases were caused by infectious agents, and powerful new technologies could be developed to treat them with great specificity. This naturally gave rise to a “find it and fix it” culture. Over the last one hundred years, medical science has given rise to many wonderful things. However, it is now very heavily focused on disease. We spend almost no time on health. We make an assumption that for every disease, there is a defect that we need to find and fix. We don’t deal with people throughout their lives, but only when they’re sick. In the United States, we have become accustomed to assuming that one’s health is managed by one’s doctor, and that individuals have little responsibility or control over their health. Where does this leave us? On the one hand, life expectancy in 1900 was forty years. Today it’s eighty years. We have doubled life expectancy in a hundred years. That’s almost miraculous. On the other hand, in 1900 the most likely cause of death for a young man between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five would have been infection. Today, it’s murder, suicide, drug abuse, or violent accidents. We have made tremendous progress, but some of the consequences of our progress are absolutely terrifying. In addition, we have a tremendous accumulation of chronic diseases, many of which are fostered by people’s own behavior. One of the problems with Western medicine is that it tends to make a reductionist assumption that for every disease, there is a single causative factor that we need to find and fix. We now are learning that there are often multiple factors, rather than a single reductionist cause of disease. People are born with a baseline risk, and then environmental factors impinge on that risk over time. There is a tremendous difference in susceptibility to different diseases, yet we often have a lot of control over environmental factors that contribute to disease progression.