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Mind your language

Are you guilty of ‘genteelism’?

17 October 2020

9:00 AM

17 October 2020

9:00 AM

‘Everyone’s been very kind to my husband and I,’ said someone behind me in a (spaced) queue. That is the classic genteelism. We are taught when young not to say ‘Me and my friend went swimming’ and end up talking nonsense. We’d never say ‘very kind to I’, but the genteel yoking cannot be shaken off.

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