ABSTRACT
In his preface to Pygmalion, one of the great verbal hygiene stories of modern English literature, George Bernard Shaw remarked: ‘it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.’ To illustrate his thesis, however, Shaw created not an Englishman but an Englishwoman, the cockney flower-seller Eliza Doolittle. Eliza plays Galatea to Henry Higgins’s Pygmalion: Higgins, a skilled phonetician, makes a bet that he can take the dustman’s daughter and in a few months pass her off in London society as a duchess. Higgins, we learn, is a professional specialist in this kind of verbal hygiene. At the beginning of the play he is asked: ‘But is there a living in that?’ He replies: ‘Oh yes. Quite a fat one. This is an age of upstarts’ (Shaw 1972:679).
