AS a progressive reactionary I had to smile at Alan Taylor's irritabilities ("Language classes are all good and proper", The Herald, April 9).

My own knee-jerk reaction is normally reserved for the misuse of the past participle. But (to begin a sentence!) and it's a fairly big but, life and language in particular are seldom so simple. As Eliot says: "Language slips and slides, tending to move down a current of its own making," where usage usually becomes the final arbiter.

While acknowledging language's multivalency it might be useful to consider it in polarised terms: viewed scientifically and objectively mutual intelligibility would seem to be the criterion - the child who says: "Me need the toilet" could run into difficulties with a rule-fixed parent; at the other end of this notional one-dimensional spectrum we could perhaps quote Alexander Pope's words on the subject: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed/ What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed".

Finally, a word on the great man himself. E A Abbot, in his book Shakespearian Grammar, has the Bard spelling the same word in four different ways. He will be forgiven, of course, for having provided us with the most magnificent and inclusive insight into the human condition our language has ever produced.

Just to confuse things a little further, by an anagrammatical quirk of fate, William Shakespeare can be rendered "I am a weakish speller". In fairness, he was no more (in)consistent than his contemporaries despite the arrival of printing a century before.

William Dickie,

12 Cumbrae, East Kilbride