Life and Letters | 6 September 2008

‘The result is a minor masterpiece, so good that one can even forgive the author’s affected forays into demotic English (‘don’t’ and ‘wouldn’t’ for ‘did not’ and ‘would not’, etc.).’ Setting aside the writer’s mistake — ‘don’t’ being the contraction of “do not” rather than ‘did not’ — this sentence brought me up sharp , all the more so because it was the conclusion of Jonathan Sumption’s review in this magazine of John Guy’s book about Thomas and Margaret More; and Jonathan Sumption is not only a Spectator reviewer, but also one of our finest historians.

‘Affected forays into demotic English’ is a splendid magisterial put-down. Poor Mr Guy! Poor me too, now I think of it, for I see that in my most recent column, delivered before I had read Mr Sumption’s condemnation of ‘demotic English’ — that is, English as it is spoken – I was guilty of three such ‘affected forays’ in the first paragraph alone: one ‘hadn’t’, one ‘didn’t’ and one ‘wasn’t’.