SOURCE: "Ring Lardner: Absurdist Ahead of His Time," in Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Vol. VI, No. 2, Spring, 1989, pp. 111-17.

In the following essay, Pellow describes how Lardner's "baseball dialect" in You Know Me Al serves to create a universe devoid of communication or logic.

In writing that is about baseball, language sometimes has a more than normally symbolic function. In particular, "bad" language may function symbolically, not only for purposes of characterization (and for comic value, of course), but to further thematic intentions in some rather surprising ways. By "bad language," I do not mean obscenity, profanity, etc. Rather, I mean what I shall here call "baseball dialect"—a specialized lingo, consisting not only of jargon, but of all those abuses that range from the lexicographer's favorite label, "colloq.," to the grammar-teacher's catch-all, "substandard." The "dialect" includes, but is not limited to, eccentric spellings, malapropisms, zeugma...