- Sir: I hope that Mr Brady is not, by his
bare- -faced reproof to Sir Denis Brogan (Letters, 27 December), starting a campaign to encourage slum English. England is surely vulgar enough already in all conscience.
Besides preferring the correct euphonious accusative case 'whom' to a nominative which is not only ambiguous but in analysis meaningless, Sir Denis probably also prefers the governing of the gerund by the possessive rather than by the distressing accusative, and the employment of 'an' before a vowel (rather than, e.g., 'a hia - —Torian,"a universal . . ."4 unique . . all of which jaw-crackers I have lately read in the pages of the once pure SPECTATOR).
A language must follow current usage, agreed; but let it be the graceful usage of civi- lised people and not that of tone-deaf illiterates.
Mr Brady had better confine his overflowing solicitude to his Celtic.
According to Fowler 'an was formerly usual before an unaccented syllable beginning with Is and is still often seen and heard (an historian .). But now that the h in such words is pro- nounced the distinction has become anomalous. A is now usual also before vowel letters that in pronunciation are preceded by a con- sonantal sound (a unit),'—Editor, SPECTATOR.
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