QES to Retain Name

by Our Hypercorrect Correspondent Stan Dudd-English

A prescriptivist organisation called The Queen’s English Society are so averse to change that they have decided, in the light of recent events, not to change their name. The announcement was made by the new head of the QES, the widely respected scholar Ian Marcus New-King whose nom de plume people around the world will recognise as I M New-King. He’s collaborated a great deal with the Irish scholar Charles Tree; indeed they are often mistaken for each other. Rumour has it that the next head of QES is likely to be William Frith, whose name, famously, was misspelled with the ‘r’. Beyond that, the future of QES is hard to determine but the clever money’s on George Severn. While still a young scholar in many ways with much to prove, many feel he will prove a more than capable CEO of QES when the time comes.

Such discussions of the future are, however, officially frowned upon by Society policy, partly because they acknowledge the possibility of change, but mainly because they tend to devolve into complex debates about when to use “will” and when to use “shall” (and don’t get them started on the unfortunate contraction “ ’ll” or the dreadfully uncouth “gonna”).

There are of course those who feel that the whole idea of QES should be abandoned. Who hasn’t heard of R. E. Publican (who, coincidentally was a publican before going into linguistics) who takes that view that an entire restructuring and renaming process should take place with the Queen’s English Society becoming the Quotidian English Syndicate (QES)? In any case, perhaps it’s all for nought as with UK Plc facing the mother of all energy crises, QES may be defunded to allow some more people to heat their houses.

Of course, in that event, there’s always the wider Anglophone world to take up the mantle. Despite some objections to the notion of QES in the wider English-speaking family, Australian wife and husband pair Coline Yell-East and Colin E L East have expressed the view that other forms of English may take the place of the Oxford-Cambridge-London lect.

	A Deep Linguistic Mystery—І.М. Вікторія “Вік” Тетяӕмәтяіх
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