Anecdotal evidence

I'm an avid reader of Byron Black's The Listening Post. English grammar is indeed tough for non-native speakers. But if the language is taught in an easy and humorous manner, with a few anecdotes thrown in here and there, it helps. Byron Black's articles, I feel, serve this purpose quite well.

Allow me add a few anecdotes of my own.

All India Radio, the state-owned broadcasting service, announced that the Ministry of Civil Aviation was going to introduce a crash program for Indian Airlines. This, of course, must have shocked would-be passengers. However, it transpired later that the said crash program was for the modernization of the airline's fleet.

The late Dr. C.N. Annadurai, a great orator and founder of a regional political party in India, was once challenged by some college students to use the word "because" thrice consecutively in a single sentence. He thought for a while and ingeniously came up with this witty answer: "You can't start a sentence with 'because' because 'because' is a conjunction."

Dr. Annadurai was asked on another occasion in a university to form a hundred words without the letters A,B,C,D. Without batting an eye-lid, he told the students to count from 1 to 99 and at 99, he asked them to "stop" which is apparently the hundredth word, without the letters A,B,C,D!

There is an interesting word which contains seven complete words in order and that is "indiscrimination". If you split this word, you'll get "in-disc-rim-in-at-i-on".

D. CHANDRAMOULI

South Jakarta