SpecGram—Extract from an Interview with Eglantine Lady Fantod, Dowager Professor of Philology at Cambridge University

Eglantine Lady Fantod, the legendary raconteuse and grande dame of Golden Age linguistics, recalls halcyon days in a series of interviews with Freya Shipley. The full memoir will be published in 2012 by Taradiddle Press, Oxford (8 volumes, price 17p).

“Sacks, Sacks, Sacks. That’s all these young sociolinguists ever think of. They simply don’t realise what things were like when I was a girl.

“There were nights when no one slept at all in the seamier colleges of Cambridge, what with the continual cris de joie floating around the staircases. Couples spent whole nights crouched in junior common rooms, furtively off-gliding and creating adjacency pairs. Nowadays young people do it all in public and no one thinks twice about it. Which I daresay is a healthy thing, really.

“Dear me, when I think what we used to get up to at house parties before the War. It’s all gone now, of course. One misses the formality of twelve really well-brought-up people at the dinner table, all minding their respective alveolar ridges and keeping their aspirations to themselves. At least, until the wee hours of the morning, when there was always a great deal of illicit creeping around the corridors. Darling Foo-Foo and I—Teddy Sapir, you know—used to meet in the billiard room and indulge in hours of passionate turn-taking. How I loved his back-channel signals. The servants were marvelously discreet. All except for Lady Haas’s maid Gregson, who had to be bribed with an enormous velar trill. She was dismissed in 1928, I believe, after Mary caught her pilfering.

“Scandals? Oh, yes—there were times when it all went terribly wrong. There was the notorious Smythe-Fotheringay divorce case, when Lady Violet was caught cavorting on the beach with a crowd of American fishermen, shamelessly centralizing her diphthongs. It was in all the papers—particularly when Violet announced that she was leaving her own speech community entirely to take up with a new one on Martha’s Vineyard. ‘I don’t care if we’re poor,’ she famously said. ‘Schwas are more important than money.’

“Of course in those days most people were dreadfully strict about it all. I remember my dear brother Ranulph used to go absolutely apoplectic when he caught us experimenting with nasalization down in the summerhouse. “Where did you get those vowels, gel?” he’d shout at me. “Under a rock?!” Ranulph found many of his own vowels on continental hunting trips, or else in the woods on his estate in Shropshire where the shooting was particularly fine. I remember one season he and the Prince of Wales bagged 18,000 brace of [ö]s. Cook preserved them in aspic, and we dined off them for weeks. And Ranulph was always forcing guests to admire that [3] that he’d brought down on safari. He’d had it stuffed by a taxidermist and mounted on the wall in his library. I’m sure you’re far too young to remember all that. Dear, dear— plus ça change, plus c’est le mouton fou.

[See also an earlier extract from an interview with Eglantine Lady Fantod in Vol CLIII, No 3. —Eds.]

Freya Shipley is the author of Whither the feline bilabial? Her forthcoming book Grassman’s Law for Lemurs has attracted widespread concern.

	Supplemental Things You Didn’t Know You Didn’t Know—Madalena Cruz-Ferreira
	The Narcolinguistic Effects of Professional Athletic Strikes: The hidden danger of baseball—is your community safe?—George E. Will, Bruce Arena, and Larry James Bird
	SpecGram Vol CLXI, No 1 Contents