144. ✒️ A letter to Terry: reply #24-09

The letter (h)aitch, evil salad, and an uncomplimentary book blurb.

Photo by Xavier Foucrier on Unsplash

This is the latest letter in my regular, informal correspondence with Substacker and fellow Brit Terry Freedman, in which we take turns every other Wednesday to delve into the things that British people talk about the most. So that you can explore these unashamed clichés for yourself we’re inviting you to read our letters over our shoulders.

My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will of course be published on Saturday.

Dear Terry,

Many thanks for your latest letter, which as usual I enjoyed immensely. I am deeply grateful that it had arrived by electronic means rather than via Royal Mail – I can only imagine the look on poor Clifford’s – our postman’s – face if he’d had to hand over a starch-sticky communication-by-potato, thanks to ‘my’ insistence  – per your claim – ‘….that all missives… be carved on vegetables’.

🙄

Photo by Jaye Haych on Unsplash

I read with interest your story about your impressive DIY skills you’d harnessed in order to put up a shelf, but as is so often the case with your stories I found myself having to turn to the dictionary. Whatever, pray, is a ‘theodolite’?

Never mind, I’ll ask Google.

A theodolite is a precision instrument used for measuring angles both horizontally and vertically. Theodolites can rotate along their horizontal axis as well as their vertical axis. Theodolites have a lot in common with transits. A transit is a surveying instrument that also takes accurate angular measurements.

Taken from the article ‘All about theodololites’ on Johnsonlevel.com.

(And what’s a transit, for pity’s sake? I only know the word in the context of a Ford van or the trajectory of a satellite.)

Terry, I’m afraid I don’t have call for any tool quite so highbrow as a theodolite in either my work or leisure life.

Artwork by Rebecca

However, we do have a dinky little round spirit level about the diameter of my smallest fingernail which we use in the van to establish whether we’re on flat ground. The wee thing has been repurposed since parting company with its fitting on one of Jim’s photographic tripod heads, and it – now christened ‘Bubble’ – sits on the van’s dashboard to call the shots when we’re choosing a pitch. We travel with so much gear for jobs, you see – and often also pack enough clothes and food to be away in the van for over a week at a time – that we don’t have room for anything sensible like wheel ramps. I don’t really mind if I’m sleeping on a slope, but I do insist that the plughole of the van’s sink is at an operable angle. Just imagine cleaning your teeth when…. okay, no, don’t. Just trust me.

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I’m thoroughly enjoying my current read, All Roads Lead to Austen, by Amy Elizabeth Smith. It’s essentially a travel memoir with a delicious Jane Austen spin (Jane Aus-spin?). Here’s a snippet from the back cover:

With a suitcase full of Jane Austen novels en español, Amy Elizabeth Smith set off on a yearlong Latin American adventure: a travelling book club with Jane. In six unique, unforgettable countries, she gathered book-loving new friends – taxi drivers and teachers, poets and politicians – to read Emma, Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice.

Due to Smith’s many mentions of her, reading the book has piqued my interest in Catherine Morland, a character in Austen’s Northanger Abbey, so I was delighted to find a copy of it for sale in a secondhand bookshop just last week.

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I love those little review blurbs on the back of books, don’t you? The two on All Roads Lead to Austen are bright and positive:

An illuminating insight… fascinating.
Amanda Grange, bestselling author of Mr Darcy’s Diary

A journey through both a physical landscape and the geography of the human heart and mind… delightfully entertaining and often deeply moving, this book reminds us that Austen’s world – and her characters – are very much alive.
Michael Thomas Ford, author of Jane Bites Back

It seems, though, Terry, that not all book blurbs are created equal. I came across a copy of The New Shoe by Arthur Upfield on the book exchange shelf at the campsite at which we had most recently stayed, and here’s what the Times Literary Supplement had to say about its author back in 1952:

Arthur Upfield has an extraordinary gift. In many of the most elementary ways, he writes badly; and yet somehow in all his long series of books he conjures up, more vividly perhaps than any other popular writer, the feel of the Australian outback, its heat and dust and rawness, its colours and its creatures, and the passionate inarticulate love with which it holds people.

‘In many of the most elementary ways, he writes badly’? 😲 Well, how very charming of Upfield’s publisher to have printed that so prominently on the back cover.

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I wonder, Terry, how do you pronounce the word for ‘h’? The dictionary entry for the word which names the eighth letter of our alphabet appears under ‘A’, but many speakers adopt a hypercorrective¹ approach to its pronunciation by saying ‘haitch’.

I had been tickled to read these two letters to the editor of the Daily Telegraph in response to their recent article about this most henigmatic of all our twenty-six letters:

Letters to the Editor photograph taken of The Daily Telegraph, Saturday April 20, 2024

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Pronunciation is such a tricky beast, isn’t it? Writing about Samuel Pepys (‘Peeps’) and his liking for asparagus on Saturday had made me think of some other baffling English surnames whose spelling bears little relation to how they are spoken.

How, for example, does one go about saying these out loud?

• Wemyss²

• Cossens³

• Marjoriebanks⁴

• Featherstonehaugh⁵

• Cadzow⁶

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Terry, I’m about to save you from a dish of death. Now that winter is over⁷ and warming dishes such as hearty stew and dumplings have given way on the menu to summery salads, I feel duty-bound to share a warning which I received in an e-mail last week from a sender who clearly has my best interests at heart.

I’ve removed the links – so we’ll never know which vegetable it is which we are not to eat, sorry – but here’s the text:

Evil Salad
Don’t eat this death vegetable

Does your salad contain this vegetable? New research… found an ingredient… inside this so-called "healthy" vegetable [which] will poke holes in your gut, the lining of your intestine...
And it's found in this everyday vegetable.
Yes it sounds crazy.
I thought that too, but then I saw this alarming video.
So what is this evil vegetable?

>>>Click Here To Discover The One Vegetable You Should NEVER Eat
To your health,
Melvin

P.S. Don't eat another salad until you watch the video. It's scary, because millions of us are eating this dangerous vegetable every day.

Terry, I’m looking forward to hearing from you next Wednesday, but in the meantime I’d recommend that you steer clear of salad. Okay?

🫣

All the very best, as always,

Rebecca

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If you’ve enjoyed reading this letter to Terry, please let me know by clicking the heart. Thank you! My next ‘Dear Reader, I’m lost’ post will be published on Saturday.

You’ll find the rest of my letters in this series by clicking the ‘Letters to Terry’ tab on the top bar of my home page. Terry and I take it in turns to write to each other on alternate Wednesdays, and I really enjoy our light-hearted correspondence! You can access both Terry’s letters and mine using the index below:

An epistolary index: Letters to Terry

Check out Terry's fabulous newsletter, and to make sure you don’t miss his reply to this letter next week, why not subscribe?

Last but not least, do please share and subscribe for free! Thank you!

1. In sociolinguistics, hypercorrection is nonstandard use of language that results from the overapplication of a perceived rule of language-use prescription. A speaker or writer who produces a hypercorrection generally believes through a misunderstanding of such rules that the form or phrase they use is more "correct", standard, or otherwise preferable, often combined with a desire to appear formal or educated.
Taken from Wikipedia.

2. Wemyss = ‘Weems’

3. Cossens = ‘Cousins’

4. Marjoriebanks = ‘Marchbanks’

5. Featherstonehaugh = ‘Fanshaw’

6. Cadzow = ‘Catto’

7. Stop laughing. I’m writing this as the rain is pelting down, and it’s only 10°C. Let’s call it journalistic licence. 🙄