Modern English Usage

Last night my brain was fried from thinking about things and stuff. My powers of ratiocination and perception, my command of vocabulary was not what it should have been. So I read the Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

Out loud.

At the top of my voice.

While my girlfriend was trying to concentrate.

We learned several things.


I learned about the correct way to spell conjugations of words that end with a silent 'e' like mute, and singe, and despite. Although I didn't see anything about the desperate.

At the top of my voice.

While my girlfriend was trying to concentrate.

Then I learned about whether we should pronounce French words in an English sentence in a French accent or not. Like cul-de-sac. And charabanc. And coupon.

I tried pronouncing them in a French accent.

At the top of my voice.

My girlfriend realised that she couldn't concentrate.

According to the Dictionary of English Usage, this was either because she was intimidated by my incredible command of not one but two languages and ashamed she could not do the same, or because she was just too impressed by my bilingualism. And this is quite rude. Apparently.

I tried to make it up to her by reading out lots of French words in a French accent and then an English accent.

At the top of my voice.

The problem with the Dictionary of Modern English Usage is that it's not very modern (just under a hundred years old, at this point) and it does have rather old attitudes to the purity of language, the disgustingness of speaking foreign words in the same way as a disgusting foreigner would, and a singular obsession with avoiding artifice and ornamentation. No peripatation shall be permitted, and that shall be that.

But if we stuck to the rules of the usage, I get the feeling we might sound like we're stuck in a sub-Hemingway novel. A novel with simple sentence structure.

A novel that has no flashy turn of phrases.

A novel that has no ten-dollar words or other examples of the author showing off.

A novel that's based on continual repetition.

And nobody likes repetition.

As I pointed out to my girlfriend.

At the top of my voice.