Re your report (Oh my days: linguists lament slang ban in London school, 30 September), a few years ago I was asked to attend the local comprehensive school to teach a one-off lesson about legal aid. As I was leaving, the teacher asked if I had any advice he could pass on to the A-level students. I told him that they need to be taught how to talk properly. He told me he could not possibly tell the pupils that.
Lawyers need to be able to compose a sentence. They have to know the difference between a question and a statement. Language peppered with “fillers” detracts from the advice you give and the arguments you advance in court. There’s nothing wrong with accents or dialects. There is something wrong about departing from plain English.
Kevin Harper
Vice-president, Association of HM District Judges
• Your article reminds me of the story Robert Graves tells of his meeting in Dorchester with Thomas Hardy, who said he was being plagued by critics, one of whom complained of a poem where Hardy had written “his shape smalled in the distance”. Hardy said he’d recently looked up the word in a dictionary, in case he had made it up, only to “find that the sole authority quoted was himself in a half-forgotten novel”. So much for banning new language.
Peter Branston
Brentford, London
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