Language Requirement

September 5th. 2005,
Sent to New York Times Book Review but not published

At Mr Sleeper's University (Yale) the decline in graduate language requirements occurred many years ago. When I was a graduate student in 1964, the Graduate Faculty -- after an impassioned plea to retain the liberal education ideal by Henri Peyre, the distinguished French scholar -- the graduate faculty voted to reduce the language requirement from two to one language. Martin Shubik, the economist, told his colleagues that next year he would be back to propose that one of the permissible languages for study would be Fortran!

Knowing Your Onions

Published: Globe and Mail, Toronto [actual day unknown]

I cannot resist rising to the bait so skillfully deployed by John Allemang in his recent column An Accent on Change (Word Play -- July 7).
It is highly unlikely that he heard any phrase refering to "onions" in a French class. "Knowing one's onions" was of course bandied around quite frequently in the English class. The phrase refers to Dr. C. T. Onions, who was one of the major editors of the Oxford English Dictionary, serving in the early years of this century. So "knowing one's onions" was true proof of one's deft use of the English language.
Martin G. Evans, Toronto.