How to save the King’s English
When a survey of 10,000 teachers revealed this month that Britain’s primary school pupils are increasingly relying on Americanisms (the Times front page declared ‘Trash-talking children are sounding like Americans’) I realised immediately what we needed. Rex Harrison. And if not Rex Harrison himself, then a dose of arguably his greatest role – that of Henry Higgins, the cantankerous professor of phonetics who first burst into the national consciousness in 1914 with the London premiere of Pygmalion. Alas, more than 100 years on, the essential truths in George Bernard Shaw’s now near unperformable play about the dire social harm caused by entrenched illiteracy and its consequences on speech (upon which,
