In competition No. 2492 you were invited to write a piece of prose entitled ‘Irritable Vowel Syndrome’, without using the letter ‘u’.
This assignment should have been a piece of cake. After all, the wild and woolly Frenchman Georges Perec wrote a whopping 300-page novel, La Disparition, without using a single ‘e’. What’s more, Gilbert Adair translated it into ‘e’-free English — an heroic feat.
There was no getting away from Nancy Mitford this week, who popped up in lots of entries, including that of bonus-fiver recipient W.J. Webster. The other winners, printed below, net £25 apiece.
‘Open wide and say “Ah”.’
‘I don’t have a problem with my R’s, Doctor. It’s the old I.O. whatsits that give me grief. The bends.’
‘Bends?’
‘Can’t do them. Mrs Thatcher had the same problem, I believe. With the EC, as it then was, happily.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t follow.’
‘What comes between T and V?’
‘ele?’
‘No, no. Think of trees, gloomy ones, often near graveyards. Or sheep. Female sheep.’
‘Ah, yes, I see.’
‘It’s a debilitating affliction, Doctor. Everything I say or write is patronisably lower-middle-class, according to Nancy Mitford. Yet there seems to be nothing I can do to change it.’
‘Well, I can think of one simple remedy, Mr Hews. Why not do as the Romans did and make that bothersome letter a V instead?’
‘Oh, what a brilliant idea, Doctor. Thank V!’
W.J. Webster
My irritable vowel problem was with the Irish, who welcomed me to ‘Doblin’ and wanted me to admire the ‘collars’ on the doorways. What collars?
It took time to overcome the problem. At last, imitation being preferable to irritation, I began to speak like people I heard riding their bosses. ‘When all is Ed and Don,’ I learnt to say, ‘I need Monet.’
If visitors do this, with lock they will find that no door is shot against them, whatever its collar. If they are ill, they can speak freely of their sore bomb or the pain in their Tommy. They will not be treated as a mog and sold a pop; more likely they will be asked in and offered a cop. Or even a jog.
Paul Griffin
Daphne: firstly, a world wide whinge: the keypad on this infernal machine is misbehaving. One, possibly two keys are defective, aka knackered; a pretty poor do. The gormless object has seen fit to let me down after a mere six months. I shan’t dwell on my disappointment with state-of-the-art technocrap, yet in Britain zooloads of people passionately loathe IT. Why the flip doesn’t ‘Dollar’ Bill Gates market nice idiot-proof systems, tailored to the likes of thee and me? After all, they’re only bits and bobs and wiggly wires; hardly sprocket science. Sorry, I digress — the ghastly Sheridans: Fiona’s finally divorcing Gerald! F. reckons that for yonks G.’s been ‘playing away’, to employ a sporting cliché. I saw it coming, Daph, he’s always had a roving eye. Roved it over me more than twice or thrice. No longer, tant pis (!). Email soonest, dear. Love, Cynth.
Mike Morrison
Angela let her words pass between her thinning lips like perfect pearls: precise, exacting collections of syllables, in which the consonants were clipped, and the vowels foreshortened — rather as if she were Celia Johnson on the sly, or Vivien Leigh as Catherine Earnshaw. It irritated her sister, Jennifer, beyond belief.
‘Anyone might imagine that we were raised in Royal Berkshire, rather than in the West Riding,’ she complained. ‘Every time we go into the village, I have to cover my ears — and watch the shop assistants cringe as they prepare the weekly order. Even Her Majesty does not affect this kind of aristocratic patois any more.’
‘I am a monarchist,’ riposted Angela. ‘However, I personally believe that her standards have slipped. One does not need to converse like a shepherd. I will not be moving my vowels an inch.’
Her speech, stilted and constipated, crystallised in the air.
Bill Greenwell
I’m a consonant woman myself. Prose needs vowels as a stomach needs laxatives — best avoided, especially in excess. How they aggravate as they invade even the shortest English word, achieving little save the keeping apart of consonant. Sense, emotion, evocation, sonority — these are conveyed by consonants, singly or collectively. All vowels are interlopers and the one that invariably makes me wince with discomfort comes last, deservedly, in that list of five. With practice, its employment can be avoided, to the benefit of both spoken and written English, as is demonstrated here. Finally, while I am no aficionado of the modern art — if art it be — of text messaging, I do admire its reliance on consonants and integers and its scorn of vowels. How simple and free of pain, yet redolent of meaning and of wit, are the symbols on the tiny screen of the mobile phone!
Alanna Blake
Yes, well, I’ve been a martyr to Irritable Vowel Syndrome all my life. It started with the frontals, e’s and i’s always played merry hell with my labio-dental fricatives. Combine them with a plosive or two and it was embarrassing, saliva all over my shirt, or worse, somebody else’s. I grew a beard, only it didn’t help. Then I started to get it in the back vowels as well. There’s one of them I can’t even bear to write. And nobody can imagine what it does to my velar palate. I went to this other doctor, he told me to say ‘aaaah’ and I reckoned my epiglottis was going to go into spasm. Don’t even ask what it does to my laryngeals. I think I need a referral to a Harley Street phonetician, frankly. And while I’m here, doctor, I’ve been getting this terrible twitch right along my alveolar ridge…
Brian Murdoch
No. 2495: Playing god
You are invited to submit a poem (maximum 16 lines) in which you establish the principles of a new religion. Entries to ‘Competition 2495’ by 17 May or email to lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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