Answer to "Test your English comprehension" (31/8/25)

Looks like all our readers are clever, and managed to figure the puzzle out on their own. Either that or some are too shy to tell Walt they couldn't get it. 

OK, here's a clue. This * is an asterisk. Read the verse out loud. Geddit now?

Test your English comprehension

See how long it takes you to decode this excellent pun.

Suzy Smith put on her skates

Upon the ice to frisk.

Her friends all though her slightly mad

Her little *.

Geddit? Ed.

Footnote: When I started looking for a suitable photo by entering "girl skater" in Google's image search window, all I got back was images of girls skateboarding! When I amended the search to "girl ice skater", the first five images to appear were girls of colour.What does that tell you about AI and the biases baked into the big search engines?

Walt is on assignment

Ed. here. Walt has left the building, mumbling something about "Rocky Road". I took that to mean he was going to get some ice cream, but a message from Agent 78 says the two of them are going "off the grid, under deep cover, on assignment". Sounds like a vacation to me, but I know nothing more except that they are expected back on June 1st. If there is any of Ma Nifkins' Jellied Gin in the fridge, I may go off the grid too.

Academic illiteracy, African style

There is such a thing as "Zimbabwean English". You can look it up in the Oxford Companion to the English Language, which I'm sure you keep on your night table for bedtime reading. Or you can take my word for it. During my time in the land of bambazonke, I was often amused by the locutions peculiar to its denizens.

The horrible white racists who settled and ran Zimbabwe in the colonial era -- it was known as Rhodesia in those days -- built lots of schools, with the result that the English literacy rate was one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.

Since independence in 1980, standards have slipped considerably. But Zimbabweans still have a great love of sesquipedelian words and grandiose phrases. If you know a lot of big words, they seem to think, you must be educated, and therefore not just fit but entitled to lead the country's institutions.

During the Mugabe era (April 1980 through December 2017) it was customary for businesses, government agencies, and individual public figures to insert huge advertisements in the local press, particularly the state-owned Herald of Truth, congratulating Comrade Bob on everything from his birthday to the opening of a new Blair toilet. To describe the messages which took up pages upon pages of newsprint as fawning would be an understatement. "Adulatory" would be a better word.

Following the (mostly) bloodless coup earlier this month, there is a new dictator in town, but the custom continues. But the quality of the English in the congratulatory ads, and in public speech generally, seems to have declined. Walt's old friend Dr CZ printed this egregious example in his column in today's Financial Gazette.

His Excellency Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa, The Principal, Eng T Madondo, Advisory Council, Management, Staff and Students of Harare Polytechnic joins the nation in congratulating Cde Emmerson Dambudzo Mnangagwa on your appointment as Head of State and Government and Commander of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces. You demonstrated resilience, tenacity and composure as you rose through the echelon and fastigium of presidency. The humility you portrayed revealed the axiologies and phronesis of a leader. Harare polytechnic shares the developmental trajectory you enunciated on your inauguration and is ready to hit the ground running.

I cannot add my "amen" because he can't figure out what the principal of Harare Polytechnic (or whoever wrote this for him) is trying to say. [I'm working on it. Always like to increase my vocabulary! Ed.] So all I can do is encourage Comrade ED (no relation to our Ed.) to take Eng Madondo's words for what they're worth -- about $1.98.

Dr CZ ends his column with some words of wisdom which I will copy here, since it seems to me their application is not restricted to the Dark Continent.
The African education system has many surprising outcomes. The smartest students pass with first class marks and get admission to medical and engineering schools. The second class students get MBAs and LLBs to manage the first class students. The third class students enter politics, and rule both first and second class students. The failures join the army and control politicians who, if they are not happy with, they kick or kill. Best of all, those who did not attend any school, become prophets and witch doctors, and everybody follows them!

Death watch 2016 and other stuff

It's been a quiet weekend here in Lake Wo... [Hold it right there; that line's been taken. Ed.] [No! Garrison Keillor's line was "It's been a quiet WEEK (etc)."] What I mean to say is that I didn't do much, read much or think much, therefore have not much about which to write. However, I did ruminate [Not on the carpet, I hope! Ed.] about how old everyone is getting, except myself of course.

The cause of my rumination was my discover, in Jeremy Paxman's highly recommendable book On Royalty (Penguin 2006, Public Affairs 2007), that Eliabeth II, Queen of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, yada yada yada, will turn 90 in April. 90! Imagine that! She doesn't look a day over 80, does she. What, I thought, are the odds that she won't live to see her 90th birthday? Pretty long, I should think, given that her mother lived to 101. I expect Prince Charles will have to wait until 2017 at the very earliest.

But there are other octogenarians and nonagenarians who might not make it through 2016. Some bookie in England probably takes bets. Wonder what odds they're giving on the Queen's consort, Phil the Greek (as Private Eye calls him). Probably long odds as well, given Prince Philips damn-them-all outlook on life.

How about Pope Francis? Only in his 80s, but rumoured almost since his election to be in failing health. Perhaps for some Traditional Catholics the wish is father to the thought.

If not the Pope, then how about a President, or, I should say, former President, thinking of poor old Jimmy Carter. He thinks he may be free of cancer, but then he also thinks a little more goodwill will bring peace to the world. He should live so long!

The President almost everyone would like to see them close the lid on would certainly be Comrade Robert Gabriel Mugabe, President for Life of Zimbabwe. For the last couple of years he's been grooming his second wife, Grace, to be his successor. She seems to think she's ready for the job, and I wouldn't be surprised if she's prepared to wait another year. Perhaps she would go so far as to hasten the Old Man's demise. Hey, it's Africa!

Well, that's enough death watch. Let me close by giving out this week's Walt Award for Super-DUH! Headlines. No, it's not "China may be using sea to hide its submarines", rightly ridiculed here on Friday. That beauty was pipped at the post by a late entry from the Globe and Mail. Over a story from Reuters about an entirely predictable disaster in Mumbai, the Groan and Wail ran the headline "Huge fire engulfs venue at ‘Make in India’ event". Not stupid, really, just funny. Congratulations.

If you're not sure why Walt would find that headline and story funny, consider what Prince Philip had to say on the subject of Indian wiring. See "Prince apologises as latest gaffe offends Indians", in the Grauniad, 11/8/99.

Further reading: Jeremy Paxman, mentioned above, is a British journalist, best known for his work presenting BBC's Newsnight and University Challenge, the latter on my must-watch list when I lived in Olde Blighty. He has also written some eminently readable books, including On Royalty, and The English: A Portrait of a People (Penguin 1999). It is, of course, impossible to understand the English, but Mr. Paxman makes a very good attempt to explain the unexplainable.

UK tells Muslim women "Learn English or get out!"

Word reaches us today of an incredibly politically incorrect statement by British Prime Minister David Cameron. Meeting with a group of Muslim women to announce funding for English classes for female Muslim immigrants, Mr. Cameron told them that, in order to integrate into British society, they'd better improve their English, and right sharpish too! Or else, he added, they could face deportation!

Did Mr. Cameron really say that? The story on the AP mojo wire says he emphasized that Britain has expectations for those who want to live in the country. "I think it’s quite right to say to people who come to our country that there are many rights that you have here -- it’s a fantastic country to live in -- but there are also obligations that we should put on people who come to our country, and chief amongst them should be obligations to learn English, because then you can integrate, you can take advantage of the opportunities here and you can help us to build the strong country that we want."

But (as the usual gang of anti-racism and "human rights" activists were quick to cry out) why just Muslim women? Well, it seems that single male Muslim immigrants -- including the 1000s of refugees and asylum-seekers admitted to the UK every year -- don't want to marry British-born girls, so they send home to south Asia and the Middle East for nice virginal Muslim brides. The prospective spouses are required by the British government to demonstrate English language skills to standards of roughly that of a child starting primary school. But once they arrive, they lose interest in learning, with the result that there are some 200,000 Muslim women in the country who can't are functionally illiterate.

Under the government's new plan, spouses would have five years to improve their ability to a higher standard, after which "No speak English!" gets you a ticket back to Armpitistan. How about that? How bad must the problem of integrating aliens be for the famously tolerant British to even consider such a discriminatory, Islamophobic, racist, yada-yada-yada measure? We on this side of the pond would never do such a thing... would we?

Footnote: Even as Mr. Cameron laid down the law to the Muslim ladies, the British House of Commons debated a motion to bar Donald Trump from entering the UK. Why? Because Mr. Trump thinks it would be a good idea to bar Muslims from entering the USA. Ah, perfidious Albion! But the debate doesn't matter, because Parliament can't bar anyone from entering Not-so-great Britain. That power rests with the Home Office.

What's UP?!

Ed. here. It's no wonder that English is one of the hardest languages to learn and understand. Who knew that just one word could be a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition? Agent 6 knew, and has sent us the following...

That word, which has more meanings than any other two-letter word, is UP! It is listed in the dictionary as an [adv], [prep], [adj], [n] or [v].

It's easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP, and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report? We call UP our friends, brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and fix UP the old car.

At other times, this little word has special meanings. People stir UP trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses. To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special.

And UP can be confusing. A drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP. We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night. We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP, look UP the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don't give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out, we say it is clearing UP. When it rains, it soaks UP the earth. When it does not rain for awhile, things dry UP. One could go on and on, but I'll wrap it UP, for now . . . my time is UP!

Oh . . . one more thing: What is the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?

U P !

Did that one crack you UP? Don't screw UP. Send this on to everyone you look UP in your address book . . . or not . . . it's UP to you.

Now I'll shut UP!

Bad English - Who cares?

In reviewing Michael Savage's Stop the Coming Civil War, Walt complained that the book is poorly written. I called it "not so much a piece of writing as a collage of transcriptions of Mr. Savage's radio rants." That doesn't mean it's hard to read. Quite the opposite. It's written and edited (?) to a level which is comfortable for a reader of the New York Post or National Enquirer. You know. The ones whose lips move as they read.

If I were to calculate Stop the Coming Civil War 's Fog Index, I'd bet that the book would prove to have been edited to a reading ease level of Grade 7. That, sadly, is about right for your average American or Canadian. (It's hard to tell about the Brits. The gap between the educated and uneducated in the UK is much wider than that of English-speaking North America.)

Thoughtful people like Dr. Rudolf Flesch have been bemoaning the decline of educational standards in general, and reading in particular, for decades. Dr. Flesch's seminal work Why Johnny Can't Read appeared in 1955. He argued for a return to the phonetic (as opposed to ideographic) method of learning to read. But instead of teaching people to read better, our "educators" are now teaching people to write worse!

This thesis is put forward -- with qualified approval -- by Dr. John H. McWhorter, of UC Berkeley (where else?) in Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care (Gotham Books, 2003) -- winner of the Walt Whiteman Prize for Longest Book Title of that year.

Dr. John (as I'm sure he'd like to be known) is a musician cum linguist, or linguist cum musician, take your pick. He makes a good case that, in the hippy-dippy 60s, American English changed from being a written language to an oral language, written down the way it's spoken.

An extreme example -- Walt's, not Dr. John's -- would be the comparison of Theodore White's The Making of the President, 1960 with Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail `72. Just the style used to denote the year in the two titles makes the point. Since 1965 -- Dr. McWhorter is very precise about the year -- authors have started to write the way Americans talk... for better or worse.

Dr. McWhorter pinpoints 1965, the year following the passing of the Civil Rights Act. That landmark legislation made it suddenly not just OK, but cool to be black. "African-Americans" (a term which would only come years later) no longer had to "act white" or "talk white" to be successful, particularly in the field of popular music. Nat King Cole was out; Aretha Franklin was in. "Black English" or "ebonics" (as progressives like Dr. John would have it) became not just acceptable but emulated by the white majority.

The result? People stopped trying to write stylish, grammatical English and started writing as they talk. This is particularly so with popular music. Try writing down the lyrics of hit songs of the last two decades, and comparing them with the words turned out by even the poorer Tin Pan Alley hacks of yesteryear.

Dr. McWhorter flirts with the notion (if not the word) of the degradation of American English. Walt would say "blackification", but of course that's not politically correct. The fact remains that even educated people, like the Prez, have adopted a less grammatical, more folksy style of speech -- "We's all jes folks heah in Nawlins!" -- and that style is reflected in much American writing, including that of Michael Savage, Ph.D.

Dr. McWhorter does not condemn the degradation of American English. He merely identifies the trend and predicts that it will continue. He's all, like, wassup wit dat? He's OK with it, y'know? Walt is not. Walt doesn't speak (or write) WalMart.

Footnote: Like Michael Savage (Ph.D.), John McWhorter (Ph.D.) could do with the services of an editor and fact-checker. "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Seuss", but then, "Suess" sounds more like the way the name is pronounced. Dr. McWhorter doesn't write very well either, but he would probably say that just proves his point.

Further reading: "Book Review: John McWhorter’s Doing Our Own Thing", Wordorigins, June 2004.

Random House Canada fails high school English

Ed. here. Since the blog belongs to me today, my words will appear in Roman letters, not italics. [Italics are mine. Walt.] Ahem... The blog is mine because the topic is proper English, knowledge of which seems to be lacking even at venerable publishing houses such as Random House Canada, part of the vast [or half-vast] organization known simply as Random House, "the world's largest English language trade publisher".

Things being a little slow here, I checked Random House's Canadian and international websites under "careers", thinking perhaps they would be looking for editors or at least proofreaders. Apparently not.

But why would I think there might be such a vacancy? Because I have just finished reading Peter Newman's When the Gods Changed: the Death of Liberal Canada (RHC, 2011) which appears to have been published without any proofing beyond what might have been done by a spell-check utility.

The quality of the output is, frankly, shocking. Errors of vocabulary, grammar, spelling and even punctuation abound. Here are some of them, shown in bold, with page numbers so you can check for yourself.

Before the "Introduction", there are two untitled pages which I suppose might be called a preface. On p. xii we find "This incidence of non-recognition..." Arrrggghhhh. Didn't we just post "'Incidents' vs 'incidence' -- what's the difference?". Oh wait, that was just this past July -- too late for Mr. Newman. [But he's even older than I am. He should know better! Walt]

Page 71 - "each new wave of Grits hot off the grittle" - I'm hoping this is not a spelling error, but an intentional neologism, a play on "Grits" which is slang for (Canadian) Liberals.

Page 80 - "until the midfifties" - "mid-fifties", surely, or possibly "mid-50s".

Page 102 - "waking a spectacular international decision" - How do you "wake" a decision? Perhaps Mr. Newman writes in longhand and the typesetter can't tell his M's from his W's.

Page 164 - "humming 'Il a perdu son epaulettes'" - Should be either "ses épaulettes" or "son épaulette". If you don't speak French, don't try to write it and expect an anglophone proofreader to fix it for you.

Page 224 - "'We're looking at a growing gap between the successive previous generation of immigrants like my dad, and the generation coming in from Africa and Asia.'" - Supposedly quoting Michael Ignatieff. What is a "successive previous generation"? Did Iggy actually say "successful"?

Page 236 - "...to send the matters to their respective parliamentary committees for consideration; he committees found..." - Missing a T there, but the spell-checker wouldn't catch that.

Page 242 - "After the first week of the campaign, Ignatieff's approval rating jump from nineteen percent to twenty-five percent..." - Tense trouble.

Page 256 - "[The Conservatives]...came under the leadership of nineteen individuals, many of whom gave anonymity of big boost." - What does this mean?

Page 264 - "To shift the burden of justified criticism on to his shoulders..." - Should be "onto", and yes, there is such a preposition.

Page 266 - "aimed at demoralizing Michael Ignatieff" - Supposedly from a "partial transcript" of an interview with Peter Donolo. My guess is Donolo said "demonizing", not "demoralizing", although Ignatieff probably was demoralized.

Noted twice - a member of a municipal council would be a "councilor" in the USA, but a "councillor" in Canada.

And finally, the piece of resistance (as Mr. Newman might have said)... Page 218 - "There has been a hard edge in the Conservative's pursuit of national competitiveness..." GAAAAAHHHHHHH!!! Does he really mean just one Conservative? No, this is clearly an apostrophe error, committed by Mr. Newman [who should know better. Walt] or an editor or proofreader who doesn't know how to construct a plural as opposed to a possessive.

Those at Random House or elsewhere large who weren't paying attention in Grade 8 English should read "Apostrophe Catastrophe" and "Let's kill the apostrophe ???". You're welcome.

Short book review from Walt: Leaving aside the problems with English usage noted by Ed., is When the Gods Changed worth reading? No. Fifty years ago, when he wrote for Maclean's and authored Renegade in Power (about the Diefenbaker years), Peter Newman was a crackerjack political commentator.

His last opus was supposed to be about the making of a prime minister. Such was the working title. Sadly for him (and RHC) Ignatieff led the Liberals to the worst defeat in their history, and quickly resigned. Mr. Newman was left with under 300 pages (including generous leading) of shoulda/woulda/coulda. The book is proof positive that even a skilled writer can't make something out of nothing.

[Expletive deleted] limerick

Walt and Len have been taken to task for their occasional use of a couple of the Nine Anglo-Saxon Monosyllables. This blog, they have been told, could be read by innocent children whose parents have lacked the wisdom to install filters to prevent viewing of "bad words".

[George Carlin said there are no bad words, only bad thoughts. Ed.]

I was just coming to that... George Carlin said there are 400,000 words in the English language, but only seven you can't say on TV. How's that for long odds, said Carlin -- 399,993 to 7! But times have changed. At least two of the seven are heard all the time in movies, and every now and then on TV. But in TV prime time, instead of the offensive "bad word", we usually hear a "bleep".

Could the same technique be used to censor text published on the Internet? Here is what would happen to a typical limerick if such technology existed.

There once was a man who [deleted]
Whose [delete] was so long, he [deleted]
[Deleted delete]
[Deleted delete]
And now he's [deleted] [deleted].

By M.C. Court, as told to Jay Jennings in "Even More Memoirs by Even More McCourts".

"Incidents" vs "incidence" -- what's the difference?

There is a general election going on (not "ongoing") in Zimbabwe today. Walt, being a former resident, is following the bumbling ["voting", surely! Ed.] closely, checking the tweets and online reports. He has just read the following:

"201 people have voted at Msiteli Secondary School in Bulawayo by midday. There are no major incidences recorded."

Walt is now huffing and puffing around the cabin, nearly apoplectic about the tweeter's misuse of the word "incidence". If it were just one product of the Zimbabwean education system, it wouldn't be so bad, but we are sick, sore and tired of hearing supposedly educated "journalists" in North America and Britain confuse "incidence" -- inevitably pluralized as "incidences", as above -- and "incidents". Let's straighten this out.

An "incident" -- singular -- is an individual occurrence or a happening. Thus, if a cop shoots an unarmed civilian at the corner of Jane and Finch, that's one incident. If another cop shoots another unarmed civilian at the corner of Yonge and Shuter [there really is such an intersection. Ed.], that's another incident. One incident plus one incident makes two incidents.

"Incidence" is the rate or range of occurrence or influence of something, especially of something unwanted, e.g. "the high incidence of heart disease in men over 40".

"Incidence" is a collective noun [like "vacuum cleaner". Ed.], and shouldn't be used in the plural -- incidences -- unless one is speaking of the rates of occurrence of two different things, e.g. "the incidences of both robbery and homicide have increased in integrated neighbourhoods". Even then, it's an awkward construction, best avoided.

Please forward this to all the English and journalism teachers on your mailing list. As if anyone cares, but we pedants can always hope.

The apostrophe is... like... such a problem... y'know?

Apparently Walt and Richard Nordquist are not the only ones concerned about the decline in standards of written and spoken English. Comments on yesterday's post have come from:


Agent 2 - What a relief to know that the apostrophe catastrophe is grinding on someone else. I see it everyday but of course it is not on something that has spellcheck. Signs in stores, or flyers, "store hour's" and "two pizza's" plus the name "the Caruso's (when it is not possessive!)


I am not a daughter of an English teacher. I have trouble with dangling participles and when to use lay, lie, who and whom, however can usually avoid those in a conversation, but you can't avoid seeing an apostrophe and that really makes you look dumb!

Agent 17 - It won’t do any good as it has metastasized, but please attack the creeping misuse of “I am like”. I even hear it from TV talking heads.....aaaargh!

Unfortunately, William Safire has shuffled off this mortal coil, but his column "On Language" marches on in the New York Times. [Shouldn't there be commas after "column" and the close quote mark following "Language"? Ed.] Walt also recommends the collection of columns published under the same title in 1980 and reprinted umpteen times since.

And... this is for Ed.... the UK news and satire magazine Private Eye has for years ended the letters column in its print edition with a section now called "Pedants Corner". The previous title was "Pedant's Corner", but a pedant argued that, since there were many contributors, it should be called "Pedants' Corner", and... you get the point. Perhaps Ian Hislop and Richard Nordquist are related? We should be told!

Answer to yesterday's word quiz

Yesterday's challenge -- set by Agent 6 -- was to discern the feature common to the following seven words.

1. Banana

2. Dresser

3. Grammar

4. Potato

5. Revive

6. Uneven

7. Assess

What is it that these words have in common? It's this. In all of the words listed, if you take the first letter, place it at the end of the word, and then spell the word backwards, it will be the same word.

Did you figure it out? If so, congratulations, and please satisfy Walt's curiosite on a related point.

There is a name for words which are spelled the same backwards and forwards, e.g. "radar" and "poop". They are called palindromes. But is there a name for the words listed above? If you know of a cromulent appellation, please e-mail Walt at the usual address.

Word play -- the quiz that stumped Walt [and Ed.!]

Walt loves playing with words. Anagrams, crosswords, palindromes, obscure and archaic words... bring it on. If the topic has to do with our beautiful English language, you would want me on your side in a pub quiz. Indeed, I dare say I am a cunning linguist.

Once in a while though, someone sends me a test that leaves me... well... lost for words. One such arrived today in an e-mail from Agent 6. (Welcome back, 6!) Here it is.

The following seven words have something in common. See if you can figure out what it is.

1. Banana

2. Dresser

3. Grammar

4. Potato

5. Revive

6. Uneven

7. Assess

Need a clue? Well, the solution has nothing to do with anagrams. Nor is it the repetition of at least one consonant. It's something else... something so simple that you'll kick yourself when I tell you... which I'll do tomorrow!

If you love Elmo, crap your hands!

One of the things Walt misses about no longer living in China [Just in case any readers were wondering. Ed.] is the amusement of reading notices, signs and other documents written in Chingrish.

Chingrish, for those not familiar with the term, is a strange and hilarious amalgam of misspellings and mistranslations used by Chinese who believe that they can speak/write English. "Of cos I speak good Engrish! I got CET-4!"

One example that always made me smile was the little sign in the Renrenle supermarket showing shoppers where to find the "CHEWING GUN".

Perhaps the product was to be found just an aisle or two over from the "Rocking Elmo" pictured here. To be fair, though, I believe the admonition to "Crap Your Hands" is actually Japlish, first cousin to Chinglish.

The picture was posted on the ChairmanLOL website, which has hundreds of similar examples. Mind you, the Chinese and Japanese are not the only ones to mangle the language of Shakespeare and Churchill. Horrible examples of "Engrish" as she is spoken around the world -- including so-called English-speaking countries -- can be found at Engrish.com. Walt invites to read, laugh, and see if you can do any better!

"Mother Tongue": a great book about the world's greatest language

WARNING! "Dirty words"!
This book review contains two four-letter Anglo-Saxon monosyllables relating to a part of the female anatomy. If you're the kind of person who never looked up "dirty words" in the dictionary as a kid, read no further.

Someone who speaks several languages is multilingual.
Someone who speaks two languages is bilingual.
Someone who speaks only one language is English.

Indeed. English... or American. Most other countries seem to have accepted the altogether sensible concept that having a second (and third or fourth) language enriches a person, figuratively if not literally.

Not native English speakers. Those who are fortunate enough to have the language of Shakespeare as their mother tongue seem to subscribe to the belief of an American evangelical preacher who told his flock that "if English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me!"

Many English speakers seem to think that if anyone's going to learn a new language, let it be the NON-English speakers. And the rest of the world seems to agree. In China alone, there are more people learning -- or attempting to learn -- English than there are English speakers in America. 99% of them will wind up speaking Chinglish, but at least they're trying.

I am fortunate to be a native speaker of English. I learned it at my mother's knee and other low joints. My mother was a teacher of the Queen's English, the queen being Victoria. From her -- my mother, not the queen -- I inherited a high regard for proper English usage. And from reading the work of good writers I developed admiration for clever and creative writing.

By "good writers" I mean the likes of Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, P.J. O'Rourke, and the inimitable Bill Bryson. One thinks of Mr. Bryson as a travel writer; indeed, most of his better books have been about travel. (African Diary sucked, but that was a charitable project and I think Bryson didn't put a lot of time or effort into it.)

But Bryson has more strings to his bow than travel writing. He is quite the cunning linguist, with a keen interest in the English language. And he has written a fine book about it, called Mother Tongue (William Morrow 1990; Penguin 1991).

Mother Tongue is not a dull book of rules for English grammar and spelling. Although it does contain chapters on both topics, it is both fascinating and laugh-out-loud funny. It is filled with trivia about not just things (words) but people.

For instance, Bryson paints an unflattering portrait of Noah Webster, who appears to have been quite an unpleasant man.

He worked tirelessly turning out endless hectoring books and tracts, as well as working on the more or less constant revision of his spelling and dictionaries. In between time he wrote impassioned letters to congressmen, dabbled in politics, proffered unwanted advice to presidents, led his church choir, lectured to large audiences, helped found Amherst College, and produced a sanitized version of the Bible in which Onan doesn't spill his seed but simple 'frustrates his purpose', in which men don't have testicles but rather 'peculiar members', and in which women don't have wombs (or evidently anything else with which to contribute to the reproductive process).

Of course Bryson does talk about the marvellous English vocabulary, about the words... All of the words, including two words for the female pudenda. Readers of Chaucer, he tells us, will frequently encounter "cunt", one of the seven words George Carlin said you can't say on TV.

Brits will know, but Americans may not, that there is a slightly milder Anglo-Saxon monosyllabic synonym, "twat", which was used by such illustrious writers as the poet Robert Browning, in Pippa Passes.
Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister's moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry.

Although it had the same meaning in 1841 as it does now, Browning somehow thought "twat" meant a piece of headgear for nuns. Bryson writes:
The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining the mistake to him.

Walt agrees entirely with Ruth Rendell, whose review in the Sunday Times calls Mother Tongue "anecdotal, full of revelations, and with not one dull paragraph". Lovers of the English language will love this book.

Footnote: George Carlin said there are no dirty words, only dirty thoughts.

Hillbilly Heaven -- a politically incorrect place to eat

Hamilton (Ontario, Canada -- not Bermuda) is (or was) a steel town. Not beautiful, definitely blue collar, the kind of place where people are expected to turn in an honest day's work for an honest buck. People who don't work aren't welcome. Neither are people who "aren't from around here".

This is particularly the case at a restaurant called Hillbilly Heaven. As the name suggests, it's pretty red in the neck. The owner, Cameron Bailey, describes it as "no place for the timid". Which is why he's the owner, because timid he ain't.

Bailey's good ole boy attitude has been noticed. He's not one to hide his biases or suffer fools gladly. Last year he caused a stir when he posted a big sign by the cash register that said halal meat, rice, kabobs, shawarmas and other items are "things we don't have and never will".

On the door was another notice proclaiming, "To better serve you, our staff speaks ENGLISH."

Mr. Bailey told the Toronto Star he makes no apologies for his attitude. "This is my own country — we're going to demand a few things around here. I don't really care. Don't try to intimidate me. We serve what we serve. Don't yell at me and expect me to change that. Call me a racist all you like; it's not going to change."

Hillbilly Heaven's owner attracted the attention of the Red Star this week when he posted an ad on Kijiji asking for servers and counter staff at the downtown location. Nothing unusual about a restaurant looking for help, but Bailey's ad included a message for dependents of the Canadian, Ontario and Hamilton governments.

"We know that Ontario's overly generous unemployment and OW [Ontario Works] systems make it seem pointless to accept a job but we want people that are better than that," Bailey wrote. "It's that simple."

The ad went on to tell job-seekers not to e-mail a résumé. Such e-mails, Bailey wrote, will be deleted. And don't call, because he won't talk to you. No, you have to do it the old-fashioned way, showing up in person prepared for a 20-minute interview.

Why so strict? Because, the ad says, "We call to schedule interviews. Half of you don't even bother to return the call. We schedule interviews and 75% of you don't bother to show up for the interview. We offer the job and 30% of you accept it and then don't bother to show up for work on the first day."

Judging from the response so far, Mr. Bailey's no-bullshit approach appears to be working. The Kijiji ad has had hundreds of hits, and as of Friday 16 people actually showed up. One was hired on the spot. That person had a wife and two kids, "so that part is a good news story," said Bailey.

For Walt's readers in the Hamilton area who may be thinking of going out for a good (North) American bite to eat, Hillbilly Heaven (647 Upper James St.) serves ribs, sandwiches and pulled pork. You can probably get huevos too because Mr. Bailey sounds like he's got big ones.

How we check our grammar

Ed. here. Walt (shown here at his writing desk) receives the occasional compliment on "his" use of English -- proper yet at the same time creative. I'll give Walt the "creative" part, but it is my job to ensure the "proper".
An assiduous reader wants to know what reference works we -- I -- use to avoid any faux pas. Naturally we have Fowler as our final arbiter. Some might think that explains our "Victorian" vocabulary and syntax, but they would be wrong! The first edition of Fowler was not published until 1926, during the reign of George V. Surely that is modern enough, and I prefer it to the 1965 second editon. The world -- and English -- had gone to hell by 1965.

When overindulgence renders me incapable of picking Fowler off the library shelf, I have recourse to a newer and much lighter work, which I commend to all aspiring writers and editors. It is The Transitive Vampire: A Handbook of Grammar for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed, by Karen Elizabeth Gordon (Times Books, New York, 1984).

William Safire, whose classic On Language is also on Walt's bookshelf, called The Transitive Vampire "a book to sink your fangs into". I imagine Ms Gordon's tongue stuck firmly and permanently in her cheek as she crafts rules and examples of proper usage like this one:

A pronoun in apposition to a noun or another pronoun has the same case as the word it identifies.
Two misfits, he and she, plighted their troth in this haphazard way.
Let's you and me get together and do away with some of the possibilities.
(You and me are in apposition with 's, which equals us, the object of let.)

Karen Elizabeth Gordon wrote a companion volume, The Well-Tempered Sentence, which is chiefly concerned with proper punctuation, including Walt's pet peeve, the misuse of the apostrophe! There are second editions of both works: The New Well-Tempered Sentence and The Deluxe Transitive Vampire. All these fine (and incidentally funny) books may be found at the usual riverine source.

It sounds...like...rilly dumb...y'know?

Walt spent some time over the weekend with someone who uses "filler words". Those are words or phrases like "basically", "really" and "y'know", which are inserted in simple sentences, seemingly at random, to give slow talkers (or slow thinkers) pause for breath or for thought,

And of course there's the now-infamous "like"... "Like, my kid goes... y'know... how much is, like, two and two? Like he's basically stupid, y'know..."

Agent 17 complains, rightly, that the abuse and misuse of "like", which seems to have originated in California as "Valley talk", has crept into the parlance of supposedly intelligent and educated people, like bank managers and government spokesthingies.

And journalists! Like, duuhhh! Zoë Triska, writing in The Blog on Huffington Post's site, admits to this annoying habit. "If you use this word," she writes, "people will think you're stupid!"

Here's her article, the second in an ongoing series aimed at promoting better English usage. If you catch me doing it, alert Ed. and he'll, like, shoot me.

Crusade for good English

Where is William Safire when we need him so desperately? Alas, he shuffled off the mortal coil back in 2009, and, since no-one has stepped up to the plate, perhaps Walt and Ed. can at least get into the on-deck circle.

Wherever Mr. Safire is, I hope he can't read that introduction. He was a long-time political columnist for the New York Times and the author of "On Language" in the New York Times Magazine. That column dealt with popular etymology, new or unusual usages, and other language-related topics, including the avoidance of overwrought and overused clichés.

Walt has a long-standing love affair with the English language, and was a great admirer of Mr. Safire's efforts to promote good (and witty) usage. A collection of his columns appeared in book form as On Language (Times Books, 1981) and has a place of honour in Walt's working library.

It's good, in a way, that William Safire is not alive today to see what has become of the language of Shakespeare, Milton and Churchill. Or great American writers and speakers like John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Tom Wolfe and William F. Buckley Jr. Safire must have seen the dumbing-down of the language coming. Not just our language but our entire culture. Perhaps he was glad enough to leave the West to its decline.

Since the advent of "electronic communication", e-mail -- no-one writes proper letters any more -- and "text talk", the English language is not just in decline, but in free-fall. There are a few brave souls who, like King Cnut [careful... Ed.] are trying to stem the tide of illiteracy that threatens to inundate us. Over the next couple of weeks, Walt and Ed. will post some of their writings, with the aim of encouraging our dear readers to write (and speak) better, and eschew "English for dummies",

We begin with a link to "Neil Pasricha’s ‘awesome’ blog helped destroy language", by the Toronto Star's Heather Mallick. In this piece, Ms Mallick inveighs against "linguistic bleaching", which she calls a crime. She refers to the misuse of words in a way that drains them of meaning. Words like "awesome", which is used so often now that it has become awful... and not in the old sense of "full of awe". Please read and heed.

A big thank-you (note the hyphen) to Agents 6 and 17 for pushing us to do this.