© Corbis
Today, Henry Higgins, the practical phonetician, would be booked up months ahead
What is the most annoying thing you hear people say? "I was sat", or "between you and I", or "for free" or "Can I get a coffee?" or
controversy stressed on the wrong syllable, or perhaps simply the name of the letter aitch pronounced
haitch?
It does seem odd that other people cannot speak their own language properly and so career (or
careen as foolish folk say) like wildebeest into the crocodile-infested shallows of the latest wrong turning of the English language. This is of more than amateur interest.
Untouchables in India, as we
reported yesterday, are to open a temple to the Goddess English. It will contain an idol of Lord Macaulay. This has put the cat among the pigeons, for Macaulay, when he went to India in 1834, took no interest in Indian literature or antiquities except as evidence of the superiority of all things European.
His
Minute on Indian Education urged the colonial administration to establish "a class of persons, Indian in blood and color, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect" to be made fit for "conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population".
