ABSTRACT
A literary critic, pondering sadly on the state of the English language and the waywardness of contemporary prose, recently attributed the malaise to (among other sinister causes) the lingering popularity of P.G. Wodehouse. The point was notable. The elegant artificiality of the prose that was meant to transcribe the conversations and the aristocratic complications in the life of Bertie Wooster and his man Jeeves. Echoing an unreal class society of yesteryear, it only added to the unnatural stiffness and inauthenticity of our current linguistic usage, especially in the parts of the world where English is a second language and P.G. Wodehouse, in dog-eared copies, is a by-word.
