Just a minor point, the Germans, Scandinavians and Dutch must feel very proud that a mongrel langauge cobbled together from theirs should be spoken over most of the planet

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1958-1961

Current location (optional) Blue Mountains, Australia via Haworth

If you do get down among the pees in the OED then look up 'piety', 'pomposity' and 'intolerance' (where the pee falls silent). Definitions look for precision. Does that make definitions pedantic? If it does, Alec, then why send us off to the OED (that huge book of 'irrelevancies') and neatly contradict your own 'argument'? Language matters all right!

The other day, while continuing my ever-losing battle against mountains of paper, I came across a cartoon I'd saved from many years back. It shows an overweight American stereotype businessman, mouth full of cigar, bending down to a squatting peon in some jungle nowhere, who's pouring his last two or three drops of water onto his failing shoots. The American is proffering a miniature stars and stripes (such as sits on every pc American businessman's desk) to the haggard-looking man and he's saying: "Hey, I'm sellin' a dream here! George Washington, Old Glory, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, sea-to-shinin'-sea - what's not havin' enough to eat got to do with it?'

Clearly, language matters.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1951-58

Current location (optional) Cottingham, East Yorkshire

Just one of the many gifts we bequeathed via the Empire to the rest of the world along with Cricket, Footall, Rugby, Shakespeare and Katey Price.

That's right, John, but don't forget the huge input from the Latin we most of us dreaded and loathed at school. One reason why English is so rich in synonyms is because of that input from two very contrasting sources. Then, of course, once Britain was administering a huge empire it was picking up words right, left and centre. As you pointed out in an earlier posting, particularly post-empire those Englishes developed individually, according to the needs of their daily life, but generally developed out of English English as it stood when the Brits finally left - one reason why the Indian English you are familiar with often sounds so quaint to a modern English (or Australian) ear, and why so many American expressions we fondly see as being ultra-modern are in fact throwbacks to Elizabethan and earlier English - I guess. It is logically impossible to be narrowly nationalistic about English because all the many variants up and down the world are as valid to the societies that speak them as is our own to us. We now have a situation in which (Bollywood being one source) we are 'borrowing' English from the English of our former colonies. And that's all positive and a 'natural' process. The dumbing down of language, which in varying degrees troubles some of us, comes from other directions, and is, in some measure, no accident, I think.

Years at KBGS e.g. 1958-1964 (optional) 1951-58

Current location (optional) Cottingham, East Yorkshire