Ask Not for Whom the Prince Tolls . . .

Many readers evidently agree with Prince Charles that English is taught “bloody badly� in schools--on this side of the Atlantic as well as on the other.

Protesting the lowering of standards in English schools, the prince noted that his own staff were so ill-schooled in grammar and spelling that he had to correct his own correspondence.

By the way, in saying “staff were� I treat staff in the English way, as a collective, just as I did ensemble when I wrote of the prince editing his letters “while his ensemble of secretaries tremble in the background.�

“I fully agree with the prince’s point,� writes G. Henry Hofer of Santa Monica, “that to deny people the use of ‘good English’ is to make it more difficult for them to compete in the marketplace. I would take it one step further: That marketplace is no longer insular but worldwide, where English--properly spoken, properly taught--is the lingua franca. Ask any Japanese, any German, any Nigerian, any Indian; or the students of Tian An Men Square. . . .�

Charlton Heston makes a similar point: “I was in England when the Prince of Wales ‘thundered’ against the way English is taught in the country of its birth. He’s right. . . .

“English is the lingua franca of the modern world, mandatory for international air traffic control and scientific publication, and the mother tongue of several nations. For each of these, and for anyone, anywhere, the English language is a treasure beyond measure. . . .�

As for the remarks of Nigel de Gruchy, deputy general secretary of the English schoolmasters union, that teachers should defer to “individual dialects� and that instead of reading books, students should follow the “pleasure principle� and learn from “videotapes, songs and dances,� Heston says, “My response is unprintable.�

He adds: “In HRH’s place, I’d have nailed the secretary by his ankles to the water gate of the Tower until he’d copied out all the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.�

Marge McGuire of Anaheim Hills notes that George Bernard Shaw, in his preface to “Pygmalion,� wrote that “the English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They cannot spell it because they have nothing to spell it with but an old foreign alphabet of which only the consonants--and not all of them--have any agreed speech value.�

Shaw’s campaign for the reform of English spelling was a failure.

Pieter J. van Overbeek II points out that there are 13 ways to spell the E sound: wheel, evil, feel, easy, paean, quay, ceiling, field, people, phoenix, money, lousy and mini. “And there may be more.�

Conrad Thomas questions my suggestion that England is in need of Professor Higgins. He notes two errors in “My Fair Lady.� When the lovesick young suitor goes to the door of the Higgins residence to inquire if Eliza Doolittle is in, the housekeeper, Mrs. Pierce, says “Whom shall I say is calling?� Later, when Higgins is congratulating himself for Eliza’s performance at the ball, she complains, “You wouldn’t care if I was dead.�

Thomas points out that Mrs. Pierce should have said who not whom , and Eliza should have used the subjunctive were instead of was .

Those complaints seem to me pedantic in the extreme. 1) Being only a housekeeper in Higgins’ employ, uneducated herself but sensing that whom is somehow upper-class, Mrs. Pierce could have been expected to use it instead of the proper who . 2) In her resentful state, Eliza could have been expected to revert to the vernacular; besides, many literate people today avoid the subjunctive.

A few readers noted that realm was misspelled in the headline: “This Earth, This Relm, This England.� Of course that was a copy editor’s joke, and a rather clever one, too.

Oddly, though, only two readers caught my own solecism in the first sentence of that column. I wrote: “England seems to be in a beastly stew over the teaching of English in their schools.� Camillo Skeete of Duarte and Col. W. H. Longenecker Jr. of Indio pointed out that their does not agree in number with England .

I might argue that I thought of England as a collective (like Her Majesty’s Government), but that won’t wash. Perhaps I was seduced by the general acceptance of “everybody . . . their ,� as in “Will everybody put on their hat?�

Bloody bad.