Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 29 April 2006

A Lexicographer writes

issue 29 April 2006

There has been a dramatisation of some Jeeves stories on the wireless. The great flaw has been presenting them as slapstick, which hardly works without pictures and ill serves Wodehouse’s writing, which depends so much on playing with language.

In what must have been additional dialogue, I heard some annoying anachronisms. Wodehouse’s books have acquired a period flavour that is part of their attraction. They were always old-fashioned, for their author’s fictional world drew on the days of his boyhood, or even upon those before his birth in 1881. But in the broadcast version a little rhyme about the newt included the word dinner-suit.

I doubt that Wodehouse would have used the word. Often Bertie Wooster refers to the old soup and fish. This I take to be white tie, with a swallow-tail coat.

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