THE NEW MODEST PROPOSAL: A DIALOGUE

Abstract

Surely somewhere in the dustier recesses of McGill, in leather armchairs and under dim light, there lurk for long hours each day the originals of Torpens and Scholasticus, those learned figures whose leisurely discourse, conducted over glasses of something forever partly plenished, oscillates forever between the lucid and the ludicrous. And somewhere in the empyrean far above, the lounging members of an even more Olympian club quaff their nectar and look down with their infinite amusement at the everlasting sturdy polarities of French and English, locked like two polecats within one polity. Out of such oppositions may emerge truth; and Abbott Conway puts deftly paid in one dialogue to two enduring misconceptions about language, the one academic and the other politic.