ABSTRACT
Useless to ask whether you recall the first lesson you ever received in English: i f it was not at the hands o f the midwife it was at your mother’s breast. From the miraculous birth o f language, commenc ing with the squalls attending parturition, grows a whole network o f accomplishments leading to articulate speech, which provides the springboard for the acquisition o f the more formal, second-order symbolic skills o f reading, writing, and rhetoric, which in turn lay the foundations (for some) o f literary appreciation and criticism and (for all) o f rational discourse. To call all these ‘English’, as we do, is excusable only so long as we remember that the term is multi-purposive.
