- By Jim Evans
- Entertainment
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Smart Talk SMART TALK By Garrel S. Utter, N.P.
UNDERNEATH: Dr. Puissant Harangue delivered the Samuel Bacon Lecture last year at the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired. Fluent in five languages and having served on L’Academie Français, Dr. Harangue believes in pure, clear, logical expression.
Logical? As much as we felt honored to have him speak to us, we wondered whether he might entertain us by trying to apply consistent logic to a language as quirky as English. The good doctor did not disappoint.
As expected, he railed against saying try and instead of try to, and calling lecterns podiums. He even advocated a return to de’d reckoning, the contraction of deduced reckoning, or navigation by extrapolation, which devolved, due to writers’ ignorance, to the nonsensical dead reckoning. We were duly delighted.
But we hadn’t thought of underneath. We were astonished. How had we missed it? At this moment, Dr. Harangue more than earned his lecture fee.
“Say under or beneath,” he thundered. “In combining them, you commit a redundancy. Why would you do that? If you must say underneath, then you must also say overbove!”
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