ABSTRACT
Well, I say ‘walked’. Did you ever see the cult series The Prisoner from the 1960s? At the beginning of each episode we see Patrick McGoohan striding purposefully along a corridor to confront his spymasters with his resignation. He reaches the double doors to the inner sanctum, and thrusts both panels open at once, standing there framed in the doorway like an avenging angel. Quirk (see plate 1.1) arrived like that. He incarnated himself into the room, enthused at us about the history of the language, harangued us to take the matter seriously, and in one hour changed my life. I don’t remember much about the topic that day, or his approach. I can recall only one thing clearly. In the middle of the lecture he spoke some sentence and told us to write it down in phonetic transcription. We looked at each other. What on earth was phonetic transcription? He saw our blankness. None of us knew even where to begin. He blasted us. ‘How can anybody study the English language without knowing anything about phonetics?’ I write the sentence with a question-mark, though the intonation was that of a parade-ground sergeant. I took the point, but how to do something about it? The solution came a sentence later. ‘If you want to get somewhere with my subject, get over to Gimson and O’Connor in Phonetics and sign on!’ Who? Where?
