THEODORE DALRYMPLE

In the preface to Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens replied to those who accused him of being a mere caricaturist. What is caricature to one man, he said, is pure and unvarnished truth to another.

He was certainly right, at least with regard to language. Though few recognise it, people in this country are still speaking pure Dickensian, for which I thank God. To listen to my patients complaining in Standard English would be the purest torture.

Of course, the beauty of Dickensian speech depends wholly upon the existence of Standard English, but that is another matter. There would he no uplift, no soaring of the spirit, in Mrs Gamp feeling so dispoged, if there were no correct way to speak. No doubt there is an educational theorist somewhere who will object that there is nothing wrong with dispoged, because Betsy Prig knew exactly what Sairey Gamp meant by it; but this is an argument not worth dispoging of.

A single phrase often makes my day. 1 think I have not lived entirely in vain if I have heard something poetic, inventive, original and wrong. An avalanche of drivel may bury a verbal gem, and so one must listen attentively. A moment's lapse of concentration and it is lost for ever, irrecoverable. I try to impart this wisdom to my students, but few if any listen.

I once had a patient who could hardly open his mouth without uttering a perfectly formed malapropism. Alas, he is no more: but when I get to heaven, I expect him to greet me there, still complaining that the antibionics had given him a gastric stomach.

Last week, I was talking to a man about the reason he was in prison. He had beaten up his baby-mother's latest boyfriend.

'Why?' I asked.

'He was baby-sitting and he was cracked out of his face.'

Cracked out of his face: how succinct and expressive, so much more vigorous than, say, intoxicated by an excess of crack cocaine. tasked him what he had done.

'[didn't want no crackhead looking after Gemma, so I took her upstairs — they're on the brown, like, so they're nice and quiet and then I went downstairs to sort him out.' Being on the brown, by the way, is taking heroin.

I asked him whether he had ever been violent before.

'My first sentence was for violence,' 'What did you do?'

'1 beat up my best mate.'

'Why, if he was your best friend?'

'I caught him shagging my ex-missus, the one before my baby-mother. They was banging away, so I went and got a piece of scaffold.'

I asked him whether he had ever been violent to his baby-mother.

'When we argued, it was aggressive.'

It? What was the 'it' to which he referred? In this context 'it' technically means the relationship between a man and a woman, at least one of whom is violent.

'What do you mean? I asked.

'Well, I mean we was having a bit of a scrap in the street and her mother comes running up to me and tries to head-butt me.

'And did she succeed?'

'No, she couldn't, she was pissed up. She's always on the piss.'

'But did she attack you often?'

'Only when she was pissed off with me.'