WESTM NSTER HAUL
Page 7
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SURELY someone should' have rapped Lord Davies of Leek ever so gently over the knuckles?
After all, the House of Peers was discussing the ever-growing assault on the English language and yet, without a word of explanation or apology, his Lordship used a foreign word when there was no need to do so.
It was a word which is getting more and more emotive currency — Juggernaut.
Now, as everyone knows, the juggernaut is a huge Hindu vehicle bearing a statue of the god Vishnu, and religious enthusiasts were wont to throw themselves under its wheels. And from the way Lord Davies was talking, this fearsome contraption is "that common thing that runs over our roads and ruins the peace of our villages — and its driver dominates industry".
Well, the rumbling of its wheels have not been heard even in Southall or Birmingham, so one must assume that Lord Davies was talking about another form of transport which has a perfectly good English title, even if it is three words long. The heavy goods vehicle.
What was more, he ventured to disagree with that expert on India, Rudyard Kipling, who said that transport is civilisation (he cannot have been thinking of the juggernaut).
It did not look like that nowadays, opined Lord Davies — now we had to make drawings for the juggernaut drivers, and sign language was one of the things that ruined the purity of any language.
The Marquess of Ailesbury, making his first speech, had a more intimate transport story to relate. Back in the old days, when Lord Stokes was in charge of "that jewel in our industrial crown which nowadays is elegantly styled 'BL'," the firm had used an advertisement containing a split infinitive.
Greatly anguished, and with all the courage of a Mini owner, the Marquess wrote to Lord Stokes, and received a swift reply. Indeed the epistle was so charming that it took his Lordship some time to realise that it dealt not with split infinitives, but how he could not get by without owning one of the more exotic Leyland models.