Don’t Say It

First editon.  122pp.  In purple cloth-covered boards with gilt lettering on the spine.  8vo.  Cloth a little pushed at spine ends else neat, clean, bright and tight throughout.  In its original illustrated dust wrapper, just a little bumped on extreme edges.  Dust wrapper design and illustration by Nicolas Bentley.

This volume follows on from Alan Ross’s How to Pronounce It.  In that book he distinguished between U and Non-U pronounciations and between the educated and the uneducated pronounciations.  In this book he does the same for words and phrases.  Thus ‘pleased to meet you’ is, in his view, non-U; and ‘I was there light-years ago’ is certainly not educated, light years between a measurement of distance not time.