English, beautiful English, the finest language in the world
I am English, which is to say I have won life’s lottery. For I get to speak English, hear English, read and write English, the greatest language on our planet.
It is a language that gave me a living for 40 years; that is itself a living thing, changing, adapting, while remaining, at its best, elegant and graceful.
It is the language of Shakespeare and Dickens and the language too of dubious characters from the East End of London, who sought with rhyming slang to make it an impenetrable language within a language.
The object was to baffle anyone, especially policemen, who might be listening in as they hatched criminal plans in their local. But rhyming slang was embraced too by more honest citizens, who enjoyed its puckish, street-smart wit.
I once overheard two Daily Express messengers discussing their weekend. “I went down to Brighton,” said one. “Oh, yeah?” said his mate. “Did you take the saucepans?”
It took me a while but I finally deciphered it. Saucepans = saucepan lids = kids. Clever, no? A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as Churchill once said of Russia.
Sir Winston, whose portrait adorned the chimney breast in my parents’ home, was a towering statesman, journalist, soldier and adventurer who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, even though his writing was mostly history, essays and memoirs.
Some thought that he lacked the qualifications for a prize in literature; others that his award was political. But there is no doubt the great man could turn a memorable phrase.
Some of his sayings were so vivid that they outlive him: Diplomacy, he said, is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.
And on political leanings, he thought: If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.
The thing about English is that, unlike German, say, it is a flexible and accessible language that lends itself to wordplay and so is equally at home in high art and low humour.
You might think this, from an episode of Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker explains who reads the newspapers, is both:-
Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers. The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country; The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country; the Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country; the Financial Times is read by people who own the country; the Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country, and theDaily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.
Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who readThe Sun?
Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.
Few were more playful with words than Victoria Wood, who came up with this verse for her brilliantly comic song, Ballad of Freda and Barry (Let’s Do It):-
Let's do it, let's do it
Do it till our hearts go boom
Go native
Creative
Living in the living room
This folly
Is jolly
Bend me backwards on me hostess trolley
Let's do it, let's do it tonight
Even allowing for Lennon and McCartney, who were awesome songwriters, I count Paul Simon as probably the best of a fabled generation. He could not have written this verse from The Sound of Silence in French (too fussy) or German (too harsh). Only in English does it possess such sublime lyricism:-
In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
'Neath the halo of a streetlamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
So you see, English sings (“And Pat, make it a song I like…” ©Sir Albert Lamb, otp). It dances, like Margot Fonteyn in Swan Lake when tragedy is the mood; or like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers if a sentence with swing is your thing.
It is descriptive too. I was moved to write this after reading Terry Manners’s letter to the Daily Drone in which he solved the mystery of John Mulcock’s catchphrase, “Powder it!” The rest of us would smile and shake our heads when he shouted it. That Mullers!
But Terry discovered that it means to make a run for it (kicking up a cloud of dust, or powder, as you go). How uniquely vivid is our language.
I found myself using the phrase “Pony up” the other day. I was fairly sure what it meant – pay your dues, or settle your debts – but I had no idea where it came from. One theory is that it refers to the slang term for £25 (or guineas, My Lord).
Another has it that it derives from the Latin phrase Legem Pone, found in Psalm 119, which is traditionally sung at Matins on March 25, a Quarter Day on which debts were settled and payments made.
Shakespeare often wrote our lilting language in iambic pentameter, whose rhythm mimics a heartbeat. Milton and Wordsworth used it too and so did the playwright David Mamet, whose characters speak in sinus rhythm that ticks along like a well-oiled Rolex. Mamet believes it is the natural rhythm of the spoken word.
The Bard introduced us to phrases such as all that glitters isn’t gold; hot blooded; and brevity is the soul of wit – phrases we use all the time, often without realising he coined them. Dickens gave us not just fascinating and grotesque characters but also words such as flummox, the creeps and devil-may-care.
This, then, is what we are up against every time we sit down in front of the dreaded blank screen to write something for money. It is daunting. Can anyone except those few truly touched by greatness ever aspire to these heights?
Maybe that’s why so many of us became subs.
*****
Some stories are just smoke and mirrors. We all know this but if they’re presented alluringly enough we read them anyway.
So it was with the tale of life in Prince Harry’s circle, by Mail on Sunday editor at large Charlotte Griffiths.
The Mail online teased us with: EXCLUSIVE Prince Harry and me: A small white pill, “naughtiness” and why I wish I could erase our friendship from my memory.
Griffiths chose to tell her story in the wake of Harry’s disastrous High Court case, which left him and his co-claimants facing a bill of up to £50 million. She had been called as a witness by the Mail’s defence brief.
Her tale was protected by a paywall online and I didn’t fancy walking to the newsagent in last week’s insane heat. But fortunately, The Times’s deputy chief reporter, Ben Ellery, had gutted it for me.
Harry, Griffiths wrote in the 5,000-word piece, had placed a small, white pill on her tongue when they were introduced at a country house shooting weekend.
We are invited to believe that illegal drugs were being taken. But no. Griffiths, who reports that she secreted the pill discreetly in a napkin, says that it was “almost certainly Paracetamol rather than something more sinister”.
So, no shenanigans with narcotics. Disappointing. Still, never mind, what about the “naughtiness”?
Well, it seems Harry sent her some mildly flirty texts. And during that shooting weekend, while she was watching a film sitting on a beanbag under a blanket, Harry “shuffled over” to join her under the cover. He put his arm around her.
Cripes, this is promising. But hold hard (as it were).
“There was nothing particularly romantic about the sweet gesture,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she found it “slightly uncomfortable”.
So no sex either, unless you count Harry rearranging silver animal ornaments into sexual positions. No sex, no drugs and certainly no rock and roll. Because what kind of rock star is going to turn up to a party like that?
Griffiths complained that publication of her exchange of messages with Harry spawned false suggestions that they had been romantically involved. She received tens of thousands of online messages, some calling her “harlot” or “slut”.
It must have been awful. Poor woman. But forgive me if I have limited sympathy.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t her messages expressly meant to convey the impression to Harry that she might be up for it, in the hope that she could lure him into some printable indiscretion?
Indeed, it was the entire basis for this vacuous, phony, disingenuous, melting candyfloss of a story. It flattered to deceive. And it’s a dangerous game, deceiving readers.
As for “why I wish I could erase our friendship from my memory”, The Times didn’t bother filching that bit.
I’m glad it was too hot to schlep to the newsagent. I would hate to think I had paid for this great pile of steaming “journalism”.
*****
Club cricketer Ryan Welch tonked 411 runs in a 40-over match at the weekend. That means he alone was scoring at more than 10 runs an over.
His astonishing feat included 22 sixes and 51 fours off 162 balls – a strike rate of 253.7.
Welch, 26, who was batting for Willingdon Cricket Club in East Sussex, claimed he doesn’t really play cricket and turned out only four times last year.
Well, here’s an idea. If he’s got time on his hands, why don’t we call him up for England? There are places going in that team.
Clearly, Welch is the embodiment of Bazball and we have just got rid of the originator of that discredited approach to Test cricket. But Brendon McCullum is still running the white ball sides, which seems more like Welch’s kind of thing.
And while we are on the subject of McCullum, do you think we fired the right bloke? England managing director Rob Key hired him and presumably McCullum’s pitch for the job included an outline of his go-for-broke philosophy.
But we were thrashed in the Ashes series in Australia and New Zealand beat us comfortably here in England. McCullum had to go. But how did Key get away with it?
RICHARD DISMORE
15 July 2026
