Mr Waugh's French
Sir: Although I cannot boast a dish, my television is wired to receive signals from France as well as Britain, so I must be among those comparatively few tritanni- ques' living within 30 kilometres of France to enjoy Apostrophes, described by Aube- ron Waugh (Another voice, 1 July). I switched on last Friday to be confronted with Waugh, for whom I blushed, beciuse his French was so awful. He got away with things, however, on the strength of his personality (and the personality of his father whom he was plugging) and because of the extraordinary niceness of Bernard Pivot. The 'rather dodgy American author' Waugh mentions expressed himself in French rather less clumsily than his fellow 'Anglo-Saxon', but both their efforts were embarrassing to a degree.
I was reminded, when watching the two of them wrestling with that most elusive tongue, of Evelyn Waugh's famous, devas- tating words: `To see him fumbling with that rich and delicate language was to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee.'
When are we English likely to emulate our aristocratic 18th-century ancestors linguistically? They (e.g. Horace Walpole) from childhood onwards knew French much as they knew English, without even realising they were learning it.
James Shorrocks
20 The Freedown, Kingsdown Road, St Margaret's Bay, Dover, Kent
'He's an alternative medicine man.'
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