29 MAY 1993, Page 18

Mind your language

CONSERVATIVE Prime Ministers seem to attract linguistic peculiarities. Mr Major says wunt for want, an idiolect unknown in Brixton, or in Worcester Park. Sir Edward Heath's vowels were notorious; Mrs Thatcher's Lincolnshire tones had largely been trained out of her, though when excited she endear- ingly came out with the dialect word fa for frightened.

And now, just as Churchill pro- nounced Nazi in a determinedly unGer- man way, so opponents of Maastricht adopt imaginatively unauthentic modes of uttering the dread word. It ain't what you say, it's the way that you say it.

Dot Wordsworth