A response to David Jowitt's response…

Abstract

I must apologise to David Jowitt for having so clearly upset him by an article that was so clearly meant to be light-hearted. It was also oriented towards the stereotypical portrayals of the language of royalty, and the ways myth and reality frequently coincide. If I did not make the distinction clear enough, I apologise; but in places I did not really intend a distinction. Moreover, it was the editor himself, Tom McArthur, who suggested I extend the term ‘royalese’ to the (alleged) features of royal speech (and also the speech of the aristocracy), instead of restricting it just to the literary or satirical representations. I decided this would indeed be an apt way of suggesting the blur between fact and fiction, between dialect and stage-dialect, as it were : hence my inevitable use of the phrase ‘literary royalese’, which still seems perfectly clear to me, despite David Jowitt's stricture.