The current (7/14) issue of NRODT has my every-other-issue “Straggler”
column in it, on the topic of my not being able to recognize instrumental
music. I got the following e-mail from NRODT reader Bill Andersen on this:
“Mr. Derbyshire: Chesterton agrees with you about the English genius for
words, words, words. In an uncollected piece written for the British
Foreign Service, he begins: ‘The problem of presenting the English culture
to that general European culture, of which it must always be a part, is made
more problematical by one practical fact; which is partly an accident. It
is the coincidence that the very best English things have to be translated.
… From the standpoint of anyone who can see it from the inside, but see it
sanely, the best things in England are poetry and humour; and it so happens
that they are both locked up in a language.’ (GKC, ’Explaining the
English’)”