Idiomatic english of the present day [antikvár]

PREFACE This book has been written to help the foreign student of English to gain, as easily as possible, some knowledge of the way in which English idioms are used, in ordinary or trivial conversation, by English people of the present day, but it includes only such idioms and turns of speech as he himself may suitably use. The practical importance of this limitation will be easily understood. Leaving slang out of the question, there are numberless idiomatic, proverbial, humorous or allusive phrases which the foreigner may hear from the Hps of educated Englishmen, but which he will do well to avoid using, in conversation, at least until he has acquired an exceptional command of the spoken language. That is why, after all, the study of English talk as set forth in Punch and modern stage-plays is of little immediate use to him. He knows his own needs, and knows that he does not want drawing-room epigrams (much less conversations with laundresses and coach-builders), but something to make him talk more easily with the people he is likely to meet in real life. If it is objected that these dialogues are not in "pure English," my answer is that they are in "English of England," and that it would have been easier for me to have compiled a book full of such irreproachably grammatical, but un-English, sentences as "Why are you always doing v