The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #159749   Message #3791359
Posted By: MGM·Lion
20-May-16 - 02:51 PM
Thread Name: BS: Grammar Police/Pedant alert
Subject: RE: BS: Grammar Police/Pedant alert
Hello, Steve. Got over our hissi-fit then, have we? I remember one joker on Uni-Chall once, introducing himself as "reading The Little Red School Book".

Might be an absurd phrase, and often misunderstood: my mother who ran a restaurant once told a customer way back then that I was at Cambridge reading English; and he replied in shocked tones and apparently seriously "What! Can't he read yet?" But it just happens to be the idiomatic phrase for studying the subject of a particular university faculty. So go on being tickled by it; but just don't expect an Act of Parliament to insist that another locution must henceforth be employed.

≈M≈