Stephen Fry's complaint about the complainers about spelling and grammar relies on a dubious assumption. Like many another who rails at the Œpedants¹ who jump to correct misuse of English in the media, he uses the argument that public usage is the final court of appeal. What is not inquired into is how Œusage¹ is to be defined. For example, English schools once had to make more of a fuss about distinguishing words (once part of the English examination syllabus, actually called ŒConfusables¹ such as the little group Œjudicious-judicial¹, 'industrious-industrial', Œcontinuous-continual¹, Œsensuous-sensual¹, Œceremonial-ceremonious¹, etc.). Because of this inclusion in the syllabus, very few errors with confusable pairs appeared in the usage of newspapers, magazines, -- even comics. So it was part of the common Œusage¹. If such discriminations have disappeared, it says more about fashions of teaching than anything else. Another UK example, occurs in the pronunciation of the letter H: I was taught in school that its name was Œaitch¹ (now still to be heard on the BBC television programme ŒCountdown¹, a word-game, and also confirmed by the Oxford English Dictionary), but my bank contacts tell me that they are working for the ŒHaitch SBC Bank¹, having, no doubt, been avid viewers of the Australian soap ŒNeighbours¹. Similarly, are our English pupils to be told that the pronunciation ŒharASS¹ is the common English usage and not ŒHARass¹ because a sufficient number of American cop shows are on English TV? It becomes a question of ŒWhich country¹s usage?¹ Take one other of Stephen Fry's examples, the confusion of 'refute' and 'deny'. ŒRefute¹ means BY USING COUNTERVAILING PROOF, PRODUCE A CONVINCING ARGUMENT AGAINST ANOTHER¹S ASSERTION: Œdeny¹ means WITHOUT ARGUMENT, TO CONTRADICT ANOTHER¹S ASSERTION. The loss of the distinction between Œrefute¹ and Œdeny¹ would be an enfeeblement of the language: I read last week in the newspaper that the Irish Sinn Feiner Jerry Adams has just 'refuted' recent accusations against him, but no arguments had been forthcoming from him. Amazing! I would have very much liked to have read his refutation. What I don't like about this error is that it seems to be used by persons uncertain of their vocabulary WHO ARE TRYING TO USE A BIG WORD TO SOUND IMPRESSIVE, THOUGH THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. One can add that it does not take very long to teach the correct use of the apostrophe. Stephen Fry himself appears to be aware of the rules: he could not have picked this up from greengrocers' price tags, could he? Similarly with 'imply' and 'infer' -- I was fairly successful in teaching the difference with the rhythmic tag 'Speakers and writers imply: hearers and readers infer'. Nor does he seem to have heard of redundancy in language, and the essential part it plays in our everyday communication -- for example, that involved in the distinction between count and mass nouns, subject and verb agreement, singulars and plurals, and more. 'Fewer' and 'less', for example, is tied to the count noun/mass noun distinction -- Does one ever hear anyone say 'fewer sand'? As for plurals, one can hear and read in the media BOTH 'bacterium' AND 'bacteria', 'criterion' AND 'criteria', 'phenomenon' AND 'phenomena' for the SINGULAR -- so just what is the common usage? The fact that no one says 'radiuses' instead of 'radii' I attribute to the fussy pronunciation of the former (though I have heard 'crisises' instead of 'crises'). Redundancy is fact disappearing as regards subject and verb agreement (e.g. -- heard this week on BBC radio, 'There's lots of planes on the tarmac', 'All of us objects to it'). But redundancy is badly named because these extra, strictly repetitive clues are there to ensure that we can pick our way more clearly through the cloud of words we hear, and thus they cannot be summarily jettisoned. The aim of redundancy is to help hearers get the message. Do I sense an underlying old-romantic resistance to the teaching of grammar here? With all the excellent textbooks now on sale in the U.S.A. (by Constance Weaver, Martha Kolln, and the like, and the absence of them in England) I fear that we English are still mired in a self-defeating ideology which is sustaining class distinctions by which we over here, both 'upper-' and 'lower-class', seem to be mesmerized. An overall appeal to 'usage' conceals both snobbery and its inversion. I trace the prejudice to the deeply embedded division in the UK between private and state education, and the foundations of that can be traced further. We even had a CONSERVATIVE member of parliament this week complaining about the Prime Minister being too 'posh' to understand the plight of the poor. I imagine that you Americans don't even use the word 'posh'. So we are 'posh', are we, if we try to teach apostrophe rules to working-class children? Edmond Wright Dr. Edmond Wright 3 Boathouse Court Trafalgar Road Cambridge CB4 1DU England Email: [log in to unmask] Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/ Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256 To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/