The Professor had a good laugh at my expense on Wednesday, when I suggested that he should bring his friend Fowler around sometime for a couple of drinks. Fowler is the authority the Professor invokes whenever issues of language arise and I assumed he worked in the English department at the University. When he stopped laughing, the Professor said that if anyone could put him in touch with a medium he’d be sure to extend the invitation. It seems this Fowler died in nineteen thirty-three, but not before producing a number of seminal works on the language and the use thereof.

The whole thing started when Maxwell used the term “instinctual”. On hearing it the Professor looked over the frame of his specs at him and informed him that the correct adjective of “instinct” was “instinctive”. Naturally Maxwell protested, saying that he had heard the term used widely, and mostly within the ranks of the intelligentsia; which, I suppose, he assumed would impress our learnéd friend.

“It should come as no surprise to anyone,” the Professor responded, “that the great and the good might seek to further inflate themselves through the use of such magniloquent redundancies. However, their societal status confers no authority upon them in the use of language. In this regard I think you’ll find that the sweller the head, the worse the offender.”

As usual, Maxwell didn’t have the sense to stay down after the first volley and he insisted that he had checked the term in the dictionary and found it to be a real, official word.

“The dictionary?” The Professor seemed flabbergasted that anyone would go to such a place to establish the legitimacy of a word. “Sure you’ll find nearly anything in the dictionary. You’ll find ‘orientated’ in the dictionary, the flabbiest and ugliest example of what Fowler calls the ‘long variant’. That’s to say words to which some inferior clown has added an unnecessary syllable in a vain bid for self-aggrandisement, and which is then picked up and, in the same pitiful spirit, brought into common use by the rest of the bloody circus. ‘Instinctual’ is a similar animal, a ‘superfluous word’ concocted by the sort of cut-rate caliph who imagines that normal adjectives are beneath him, or fail somehow to reflect his exalted status. If I remember correctly, Fowler places the blame for this particular atrocity at the feet of shrinks or therapists, or some other profession, whose scientific and intellectual basis is so tenuous that an impressive line in jargon is needed to keep the discipline afloat.”

It was at this stage that I exhorted the Professor to bring the bould Fowler around for a couple of pints sometime, and, frankly, I’m glad that I did, because things looked to be in danger of turning decidedly sour between himself and Maxwell again, just like in the bad old days.

“At least ‘orientated’ and ‘instinctual’ have sprung from the roots of the correct terms,” Two Ducks Butler piped up, in an effort to maintain the cease-fire. “I got a mail at work not too long ago, from a colleague telling me that so-and-so was really trying his ‘patients’. I mailed him back saying that I didn’t know he’d gone into practice, but I think the wit was lost on him because he replied with three question marks.”

I attempted to sustain this peacekeeping momentum by pointing out that it wasn’t just individual words that were being impersonated, inflated and mutilated, but often entire idioms. I related how a member of the public had written to me recently regarding some or other deplorable situation, and had concluded his otherwise coherent rant with the observation: “At that stage the whole deck of cards falls down.”

“But these, I assume, were laymen,” said the Professor, who had been diverted from any further abuse of Maxwell for the time being. “And while we should expect better of them, their iniquities pale beside the incompetence demonstrated by many of our professional wordsmiths. Only a few months ago I heard a radio advertisement for one of the Sunday newspapers, in which we got a preview of some exclusive about how husbands engaging in flings while abroad were ‘flaunting’ their matrimonial vows and ‘destructing’ their marriages in the process. A prepared text, one would assume, from someone accepting a wage as a copywriter. And if that weren’t bad enough, it highlighted the more disturbing question: what were the editors at the paper and at the broadcaster doing while the unsuspecting public was being pelted with these literary lemons?”

It went on from there, but without much of a contribution from the now grouchy Maxwell. Two Ducks regaled us by recalling the occasion when, upon being asked to write about what he’d done on his holiday, a student wrote “sight seen mostly”, and the Professor gaily poured his scorn upon those “vainglorious and ignorant gasbags” who felt that “fulsome” was superior to “full” in the same way that “fortuitous” was superior to “fortunate”.

“And then of course,” he smiled as if reminded of an old friend, “there are those inimitable Dublinisms which could conceivably be considered items of local charm and interest, but for the fact that they are commonly employed without the slightest whiff of irony. I refer of course to the fallacious fusings of ‘irrespective’ with ‘regardless’, and ‘impertinent’ with ‘impudent’, giving us respectively, ‘irregardless’ and ‘imperint’. Two favourites, I regret to say, of my own father’s; may the Lord have mercy on him.”

At the end of the moment’s silence that followed, Maxwell at last emerged from his sulk to clear his throat.

“I was presented with a couple of rather shocking errata myself recently in a letter,” he told us. “I don’t think it’s too much to say that I felt positively violated by what I sincerely hope was the unintentional innuendo at its conclusion. It read: ‘I thrust the foregoing to your satisfaction. Yours etc.’”