Mind your language
I HEARD Sir Malcolm Thornton on the Today programme the other day saying that he would be 'meeting with' teachers. And who, pray, is Sir Mal- colm? Why, chairman of the Select Committee on Education, no less.
Of course he might meet with an acci- dent; only Americans meet with each other. Not that we need be self-righ- teous and tick off Sir Malcolm — any one of us can use an Americanism casu- ally in conversation. It is much more annoying when such usages are written into news bulletins or newspaper reports. That should stop. Even more annoying, perhaps, is the common con- struction 'demonstrators pelted police with rocks'. A rock is a large piece of stone, and it would have to be a strong demonstrator indeed to move one. The English for the American rock is stone.
By the way, if Sir Malcolm wished to defend himself, he could appeal to the Oxford English Dictionary meaning 11b, which dates back to before 1300, e.g., `In the temple with her he met' (Cursor Mundi). But that meaning is marked `obsolete', and for an MP surely to be obsolete is worse than imitating the Americans.
Dot Wordsworth
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