Dot Wordsworth

Mind Your Language | 1 October 2005

A Lexicographer writes

issue 01 October 2005

I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of Venice, the film with Al Pacino as Shylock. At the end of Act Three, Scene Two, Bassanio reads out a letter, part of which says, ‘All debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death.’

At first Dr Schofield put it down to some American mangling, but then, in an act of scholarship, the learned doctor looked it up in the handy Shakespeare without which no consulting room is complete. And there it was: ‘between you and I’.

I know that this sounds like something Hyacinth Bucket, or anyone else more eager to be genteel than certain about grammar.

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