Letter: Clarity on the Clapham omnibus

From Mr Peter Cook

Sir: It is a bit rich for Will Self ("Rules to kill English with", 1 August) to claim that "the only way to discover if a piece of English is truly grammatical is to go and ask the people who use it if they understand it", and then come out with:

written language ... is continually fertilised and synergised by foreign languages, argot, patois and slang. This occurs at the level of utterance, when the multifarious semiologies ... are simultaneously braided in the act of understanding.

Well. That's clear then.

Yours faithfully,

Peter Cook

Reading,

Berkshire

1 August