“There are all kinds of pedants around with more time to read and imitate Lynne Truss and John Humphrys than to write poems, love-letters, novels and stories it seems. They whip out their Sharpies and take away and add apostrophes from public signs, shake their heads at prepositions which end sentences and mutter at split infinitives and misspellings, but do they bubble and froth and slobber and cream with joy at language? Do they ever let the tripping of the tips of their tongues against the tops of their teeth transport them to giddy euphoric bliss? Do they ever yoke impossible words together for the sound-sex of it? Do they use language to seduce, charm, excite, please, affirm and tickle those they talk to? Do they? I doubt it. They’re too farting busy sneering at a greengrocer’s less than perfect use of the apostrophe. Well sod them to Hades. They think they’re guardians of language. They’re no more guardians of language than the Kennel Club is the guardian of dogkind.”

“You said somewhere that you would like to write in one of the Nordic languages because they have more vowels, and vowels are more serious.’You:‘Did I say that? But Latin languages have more vowels than Nordic ones! I think what I meant was that I would like to write in one of those ancient northern tongues which were almost entirely made up on vowels. I’ve always felt it had something to do with the climate. They were hot languages, insulated by all those heaped up vowels.’Me:‘Ancient Hebrew only had consonants. Presumably so that there was no risk of them accidentally writing the secret name of God.’You:‘Or perhaps that was to do with the climate too. Consonants were more open and airy, more suited to a language of the desert.’‘You also said that you hated sans serif typefaces.’‘Oh, yes, they’re terrible! All those naked letters, reduced to their stark scaffolding. No-one can possibly recognise their mother tongue when printed in a Futura typeface. It lacks maternal warmth, it lacks friendliness.’‘I fear Cuervo may be right: we are somewhat unscientific.’‘And prejudiced too. Vowels can be dispensed with. A text written solely using vowels would be illegible, but in a text using only consonants, one could guess the vowels. A text in which X replaced all the Os, as in that story by Poe, might prove difficult to read, but would, ultimately, be decipherable.”

“Do you know the Guardians?” I asked Zay. “Is there some kind of club or yearly get-together where Guardians get drunk, wear funny hats, and compare war stories?”

“Argot is nothing more nor less than a wardrobe in which language, having some bad deed to do, disguises itself. It puts on word-masks and metaphoric rags.”

“Imagine you had a friend who was there for you all the time and you were there for them, but they stopped being there for you as much as they used to which you can understand a little because people have things to do, but then they’re around less and less no matter how much you try to reach out to them. Then suddenly one day - nothing - they’re gone. Just like that. Then you write to them, and you’re ignored, and then you write to them again and you’re ignored and finally you write to them for a third time and they barely even want to make the appointment, they’re so busy with their job, their friends and their car. How would you feel?”

“Timothy Dunnigan: The kinds of metaphorical language that we use to describe the Hmong say far more about us, and our attachment to our own frame of reference, than they do about the Hmong.”