Education: Basic Blasted

Winston Churchill has advocated Basic English for international communication (TIME, Sept. 20). Last week a scholarly U.S. corporal’s guard attacked Basic and defended the King’s English against the King’s Prime Minister. At a Manhattan meeting of the American Dialect Society, Corporal Allen Walker Read was among those protesting the “high power promotion” of Basic. Some of their points:

>Using Basic weakens full English.

>Basic’s 850 words are 500 short of a practical working vocabulary.

>Some Basic words (like “sticky”) are not as useful as some non-Basic words like “want.”

>To try to make the world adopt Basic would be linguistic imperialism.