This Is Me

Three days before he made the grammatical welkin ring, Winston Churchill was collecting an honorary degree at Columbia University. In the very home town of the American language, he was brash enough to decry the "undue reliance upon slang. In its right place slang has its virtues, but let us keep a tight hold of our own mother tongue. . . ."

Then he turned up at New Haven's Soundscriber Corporation, whose workers had put in overtime hours to finish two electronic recording machines, for Churchill's use in dictating his memoirs. In gratitude, Churchill rolled off a recorded message to the workers: "This is me, Winston Churchill, speaking himself to you, and I am so glad to be able to thank you in this remarkable way."

The eyebrows of newspaper editors, the greatest pedants going, shot up. It was, said the New York Times stiffly, a "remarkable sentence." But college professors, quickly appealed to, proved as disappointing as Balaam. To a man, they put their O.K. on Churchill's grammar-defying "This is me" (a usage that H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, has already admitted to "conversational respectability, even among rather careful speakers of English"). Said Yale's Robert D. French: men like Churchill make the English language. Seconded Princeton's Gordon H. Gerould: idiomatic English is good speech, prissy English is not. Said Columbia's Raymond M. Weaver: "A cheer for Mr. Churchill."

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