If this is not desirable, our educational authorities will have to take in hand, even more seriously than at present, the subjugation of cockney in our national schools. And yet, would it be better if your milk-man’s boy said every morning: “Heah you are! A quart of milk, half a pound of buttah, and a bushel of eggs?* That raight? Really! I’m frightfully bucked.* Good-bay!”
Perhaps some day our educational authorities may make both these forms of linguistic disease notifiable, and isolate the sufferers.*
Abridged.
From ‘Castles in Spain and Other Screeds’ (1927), by John Galsworthy (1867-1933).
* A quart is two pints, half a pound of butter is just a little bit less than a typical supermarket 250g block. A bushel is a British measure for dry goods such as grains, equivalent to 8 gallons or about 36 litres. A single gallon jar will hold about 64 large hen’s eggs. No wonder our milkman sought confirmation; no wonder he was ‘frightfully bucked’ when he got it.
* Just as Galsworthy dropped ‘stunt’ into his literary Cockney, he now drops ‘frightfully bucked’ into a chirpy milkman’s inventory, a phrase more suited to the lips of PG Wodehouse’s upper class drone Bertie Wooster.
* A notifiable disease is one that by law must be brought to the attention of the authorities.