There used to be a language called the Queen's English. Whether it exists still, or whether it can exist without infringing some popular Human Right, I am too old to know. The BBC seems largely to have given it up, no doubt in a democratic anxiety to show that it is not élitist, and the sooner johnson's Dictionary is made compulsory reading on their staff training courses, the better. Better still if it were compulsory reading for whoever it is recruits the staff in the first place. There must - new inventions apart - be words not in Johnson which it is legitimate to use in addressing the public at large, but the degradation of meanings has gone beyond anything that is sensible. For the old, the inconvenience is only that they do not understand what is said to them; for the young the trouble goes deeper. They may never acquire the basic instrument of understanding, which is the language hitherto passed down by oral tradition. Much is said in these days about an 'oral culture', said to be that of present century, but most of the millions of words poured out by broadcasters are or are inspired by semi-literate scripts of one sort or another. In pronunciation and delivery the bad habits of script-readers are certainly influential: who else would have invented the idiotic habit of putting a heavy emphasis on prepositions - little words it is easy to see coming, in a script, and including that triumphal 'from' which ...