However, there are some abnormalities—the main character in Casina is not mentioned by name anywhere in the text. In other instances, Plautus will give a name to a character that only has a few words or lines. One explanation is that some of the names have been lost over the years; and for the most part, major characters do have names. Language and style Overview Plautus wrote in a colloquial style far from the codified form of Latin that is found in Ovid or Virgil. This colloquial style is the everyday speech that Plautus would have been familiar with, yet that means that most students of Latin are unfamiliar with it. Adding to the unfamiliarity of Plautine language is the inconsistency of the irregularities that occur in the texts. In one of his studies, A.W. Hodgman noted that: the statements that one meets with, that this or that form is "common," or "regular," in Plautus, are frequently misleading, or even incorrect, and are usually unsatisfying.... I have gained an increasing respect for the manuscript tradition, a growing belief that the irregularities are, after all, in a certain sense regular. The whole system of inflexion—and, I suspect, of syntax also and of versification—was less fixed and stable in Plautus' time than it became later. Archaic features The diction of Plautus, who used the colloquial speech of his own day, is distinctive and non-standard from the point of view of the later, classical period. M. Hammond, A.H. Mack, and W. Moskalew have noted in the introduction to their edition of the Miles Gloriosus that Plautus was "free from convention... [and] sought to reproduce the easy tone of daily speech rather than the formal regularity of oratory or poetry. Hence, many of the irregularities which have troubled scribes and scholars perhaps merely reflect the everyday usages of the careless and untrained tongues which Plautus heard about him." Looking at the overall use of archaic forms in Plautus, one notes that they commonly occur in promises, agreements, threats, prologues, or speeches. Plautus's archaic forms are metrically convenient, but may also have had a stylistic effect on his original audience. These forms are frequent and of too great a number for a complete list here, but some of the most noteworthy features which from the classical perspective will be considered irregular or obsolete are: the use of uncontracted forms of some verbs such as mavolo