Dear Idlers

I hope you have all been enjoying the offerings on our website. This week we were really pleased to run a piece by negotiation expert Hilary Gallo, which you can read here. Hilary will be taking a class at our forthcoming Business for Bohemians course.

At the weekend we began a new series of gardening articles. Author, broadcaster and organic gardener Alys Fowler had this advice as to what to do in the garden in February: “nothing”. You can read her piece here. There will be more gardening advice every Saturday.

I notice that the grammar wars continue. This week Times hack Oliver Kamm has released his non-pedantic guide to English grammar. It’s moderately scholarly in that he quotes liberally from the classic authors. On matters of usage, he says “it’s up to you, really” on pretty much everything, and even excuses corporate giant Tesco for mangling the language. He doesn’t mind people confusing “its” with “it’s”.  Oddly he barely mentions William Cobbett, who is my personal grammar hero. Cobbett believed a good knowledge of grammatical basics could act as a bullshit detector. He, and Coleridge as it happens, would regularly take apart an opponent’s bad grammar, Lord Castelreagh, perhaps, as a sign of sloppy or misleading thinking. In this they anticipated Orwell’s concept of Newspeak, where language is manipulated by those in power to bamboozle the people. For Kamm, an Orwellian attention to this sort of detail is merely “snobbish and wrong” and the powerful can do what they like with words. Kamm’s style hero is the over-rated language scientist and Dawkins fan Stephen Pinker. Their basic idea is that they describe how language is actually used and avoid laying down any rules. This is fine for academics who love to study the amusing patois and textspeak of the youth, but most people want stronger guidance.

In the world of online courses, where we are pioneering as ever, our new course “How to Dress: A Guide for the Modern Gentleman with Gustav Temple” has been selling at a steady clip, and new courses from Harry Mount on the history of British architecture, Mary Killen on modern manners and elocution with Sir Timothy Ackroyd are all in development. We’re also shortly to announce a new online gardening course with Alys Fowler called “How to Grow Vegetables”. You may inspect our range of things to learn online here.

And now can I ask you for your help again with the website. I am still looking for your pictures of sleeping cats and sleeping dogs. Plus I would love entries for our Crap Jobs and Perfect Day features. Keep your accounts to 500 words or less. Send them straight to me.

Toodle oo,

Tom Hodgkinson

READERS’ RESPONSES

Sir: I’m on your side in the grammar debate but, coming from Castlereagh (a name which has been applied to a small “townland”, two larger “baronies”, Castlereagh Upper and Castlereagh Lower, and the soon-to-be-abolished, post-1973 “local government district”/ borough), I have to point out that the letters “l” and “e” were in the wrong order.

Aristocratic titles are seldom logical. The Viscountcy of Castlereagh was a subsidiary title of the Marquess of Londonderry. The famous (but widely disliked) Foreign Secretary who constructed the Quadruple Alliance against Napoleon and attended the Congress of Vienna, was the son of 1st Marquess and, on his father’s death, became 2nd Marquess.

Marquesses of Londonderry did not live within any part of the Barony of Castlereagh. They lived within the Barony of Ards (at Mount Stewart, a country house on the eastern shore of Strangford Lough) and nowhere near Londonderry. However, the family had strong links with Co Donegal, which is “next door” to Londonderry.

Further confusion was caused by the application of the “Londonderry” name, elsewhere. The family owned coal mines in Co Durham. The Stewarts (or Vane-Tempest-Stewarts as they eventually became) also had a grand house in Park Lane, London, but it was demolished fifty years ago.

The library of my grammar school in Belfast was named after 7th Marquess (who, as an unusually forward-thinking and anti-sectarian Minister of Education in the Northern Ireland Government had tried to secularise primary schools in the 1920s but had failed because of the influence of the Vatican over the British Foreign Office and the influence of the Foreign Office over the Home Office, which ultimately controlled the Governor of Northern Ireland and instructed him to withhold the Royal assent if the Education Bill were passed). Use of the name “Londonderry Library” often resulted in books being sent to Magee College, Foyle College or the Central Library, all in the city of Londonderry.

Most people call the city “Derry”, either for the sake of convenience or because they are Irish Catholic-nationalists who object to the “colonialist” overtones of “Londonderry”.  The “London” prefix commemorates the plantation of the county and city under the auspices of the Corporation of London, through “the Honorable the Irish Society”, a company which still exists and has premises in the county town of Coleraine.

RICHARD MIDDLETON