Welcome to the Allusionist in which I, Helen Salzman, squeeze languages cheeks and say,

haven't you grown?

Coming up in the show are some words which you may find distressing if you're the kind

of person who punches the tabletop whenever you hear something like irregardless.

On our current theme of the misuse of English, Dysner John tweeted me, I'm in a lecture

where the presenter has said, the whole gamete when they mean gamut, three times.

How do you politely point out this kind of thing?

Typically John, combining politeness with pedantry doesn't tend to turn out all that well, but

how about this?

Pick out a tasteful and inoffensive greeting card such as you might send your grandmother

for her birthday, maybe with a picture of some atroscan pottery or a black and white

photo of a lily pond.

Inside, you write the following.

Dear lecturer,

Thank you so much for the lecture which I found very thought-provoking to wit, the word gamete,

which as we both know, means a sexual reproductive cell, is from the ancient Greek gamos, meaning

marriage, suggesting the romantic union between gamete and gamete at conception.

Whereas gamut, which as we both know, means the full range of something, is a contraction

of the medieval Latin phrase gamut ut, the gamut being the Greek letter G, which indicated

the note on the musical scale below A, and ut, which around the 11th century, was the

first note in the musical scale.

Audrey, me, far solar, ut was later replaced by dough, for reasons I can't get into because

...