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Sutherland,
by Islay McLeod
Portia knew her stuff
I laughed out loud at Kenneth Roy’s piece (27 September) on serious offences against the English language. It may be totally politically incorrect but I’d be happy for my mythical daughter to run off with any teacher who could explain to her the difference between its and it’s.
When I left my last job in what is euphemistically termed ‘academia’, a colleague who was similarly frustrated in her attempts to educate students in language skills wanted to have a leaving gift for me engraved with lines from ‘The Merchant of Venice’, where Portia says:
How far that little candle sheds his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
The engraver, a youngish chap, could not cope with ‘his’ beams, not realising this was a survival from when English had gendered nouns, and insisted the quote should be: ‘throws it’s (sic) beams’. When my friend remonstrated with him, he exclaimed: ‘I must be right, ‘cos I did English at **** uni’, naming one of our more prestigious Scottish seats of learning. (Sic) transit gloria mundi?
Dr Mary Brown
It is so refreshing to read journalism (27 September) that reminds us that not everything was thought of, or invented, just last week. I remember Muggeridge. The prognostications and predictions from his rectorial address have long ago come to pass over here in western Canada, as well as in the UK. And as with the UK, there are no real questions about where it is all going. It’s a bit like ‘progress’. ‘Progress’ is good. Mindlessly so. Unquestionably and un-examinedly so. Just like, more is better, and bigger is better.
Michael Elcock
I’m not sure that Malcolm Muggeridge is remembered by as few people as Kenneth Roy thinks. In fact, I have spotted three references to him (not counting Kenneth’s) in the last few weeks. First, in David Torrance’s edited edition of ‘Great Scottish Speeches’ (recently republished in paperback by Luath Press) which contains a decent chunk of the Edinburgh University farewell speech that Kenneth refers to.
Second, a national newspaper review of the film ‘The Campaign’ citing Muggeridge’s resignation from the editorship of ‘Punch’ in 1957 because public life was beyond satire.
And third, at this year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival session with John Calder and Jim Haynes who organised the 1962 writers’ conference in Edinburgh. Muggeridge was to be the permanent chair at the conference but left because, in Haynes’s words, ‘Sonia Orwell said no’. Muggeridge was a prophet of sorts, but I doubt even he predicted that six years after propositioning Sonia he would be slaying the Edinburgh University students for demanding ‘the resort of any old slobbering debauchee anywhere in the world at any time…Dope and Bed’.
Harry McGrath
Kenneth Roy’s reference to Keith Waterhouse, the death bed of the apostrophe, and Egg’s Benedict reminds me of what I have always considered an unbeatable example of the curse – spotted by a friend outside an Edinburgh cafe; it read, Various’ Ice’s’ – three apostrophic mistakes in two words surely deserves to be graven in the hardest quartz.
Dave Harvie
I received a spam today with the heading: ‘Now you can receive a degree much more easier’ and thought this might amuse Kenneth Roy following his piece on Megan’s teacher.
Gerard Rochford
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