Re: A Lonely Place of Dying
Did she say specifically he couldn't speak it? I remember him telling his "grandfather" that he couldn't understand half of what he said, but that sounded to me a lot like things I've heard from people I knew, or kids I've known, who grew up wiht a second language. That is, that sometimes they control how much they want to admit they speak and when.
Which might be fanwank on my part. But I imagined it as Dick growing up around Romany speakers, hearing it spoken regularly, so that no matter how out of practice he might be at the moment he'd be fluent within a couple of days if he had to speak it, based on my experience with people who grew up with another language. A lot of European carny talk is based on Romany, like the stuff Dick knew in B&R.
Just my way of saying that I love making his background matter too.