EURO ENGLISH MAYHEM
To Orwell Today,
re: Euro English
Dear Sir -
Mark Twain didn't write the "Euro English" satire. Please credit the proper author, Dolton Edwards in 1941. For full text and correct title of the original story (plagiarists usually shorten it and assign it new names like that "Euro English" title), as well as for full and correct bibliographic citation of the source publication, search Google for "Dolton Edwards" and you'll have it in five minutes. Crediting it (or some mangled version of it) to Mark Twain or George Bernard Shaw or to the EEC (the three most usual false attributions) re-writes the facts as despicably as any Orwellian "Ministry of Truth."
Please correct the error, and please ask your readers to help spread the correction by Internet every bit as far as the plagiarized/mistitled/misattributed/mangled story itself has spread.
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone - Handwriting Repair
Greetings Kate,
Since I put up the Euro English satire (credited to Author Unknown) over three years ago you're the third person to email saying who its true author is.
The first person said it was Mark Twain.
Then a second person wrote in to say it WASN'T Mark Twain but instead someone named M. J. Shields.
Now you write and say it was neither of them but someone named Dolton Edwards and on your suggestion I did a Google search and found his essay MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM (first published in 1946). You're probably right and he WAS the original writer of what has now become known as EURO ENGLISH. But I must say that I do prefer the adapted version by AUTHOR UNKNOWN which has finessed it down quite nicely.
All this Euro English talk has caused me to remember that Orwell had once written an AS I PLEASE column on NU SPELING and it occurs to me that Euro English must have been what he was talking about.
As can be seen, Orwell was against the idea of fooling around with the English language and he had similiar negative comments to make about the idea of changing England's weights and measures from imperial to metric.
I hope this suffices to give Euro English credit where credit is due.
All the best,
Jackie Jura
PS - I am not a "sir" by the way. "Jackie" is the feminine of "Jack".
NU SPELING, by George Orwell
MEIHEM IN CE KLASRUM, by Dolton Edwards
TWAIN QUOTE NOT, by M. J. Shields
A PLAN FOR THE IMPROVEMENT OF ENGLISH SPELLING, by Mark Twain
EURO ENGLISH, by Author Unknown
Jackie Jura
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