Let's Speak English

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priest in a cathedral. He's often long and thin, too, but isn't allowed to make quite so much noise.

When jerusalem was still under the Turks, their military intelligence department heard that the Anglican Bishop was making CANONS in the cathedral. So they sent a lot of soldiers and dug up the floor to try to find them. You mayn't believe it, but that's a true story.

By the way the plural of CANNON (the gun) is CANNON, not CANNONS. 'I fired one CANNON: three CANNON ; five CANNON'.

Now there are two different words pronounced BRIDLE. One's a piece of harness for an animal's head and is spelled B-R-I-D-L-E. The other BRIDAL, - A-L - belongs to a woman who's getting married - a BRIDAL veil. When a woman gets married, she puts a BRIDAL veil over her own head and a leather BRIDLE over her husband's head - or so it seems to him.

PEACE is a word with a nice sound. isn't it? To make PEACE : to keep the PEACE. It's something we all want and appreciate and it's spelled P-E-A-C-E. But all the PEACE vou get in the world nowadays is a PIECE of shell in the face or a PIECE of bomb in the back of the neck - and then it's spelled P-I-E-C-E. If you want P-E-A-C-E you can find it only in the dictionary - or the grave.

There are many kinds of flowers in Palestine - sun-flowers, that provide us with seeds to spit out at the cinema: wall-flowers which, in English idiom are girls who have no partners at dances and sit like flowers with their backs to the wall: even cauliflowers*, my favourite button-hole. In all these, the word FLOWER is spelled F-L-0-W-E-R. But if you want to make bread you need another kind of flower, and that is F-L-0-U-R. I once tried to make bread. I hadn't any yeast so I put in a bottle of Eno's Fruit Salts. So I won't tell you what happened.

Let me finish by asking all the members of the Brighter English League to remember to spell it L-E-A-G-U-E. One or two members spelled it L-I-G-E which is, of course, the French spelling. Although French is still the language of diplomacy and love, we are the Brighter English League and use the English spelling L-E-A-G-U-E.

One member misunderstood what I said and wrote to me as the 'President of the Broader English League'. I suppose the more members we have the broader the League gets. But broad English usually means English with rather a broad - or countrified- accent: for example 'King Jarge' instead of 'King George'. Our League is the Brighter English Leaaue _ you know_ 'Bright' - like your eyes.


*The morning after this broadcast, the President found a bouquet on his desk tied up in tissue paper. It contained a cauliflower presented bv an admirer.

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