Reader Millington

Yes, yes, AP writers used the English language with fondness and wit, never slapped down thelazy phrase and were brave, and accomplished, enough to venture into new territory - Jonathan's pushing forward the limits of the adverb, for example. Yet what I most admired was AP's services to spelling.

No other magazine provides such a valuable reference on the correct way to spell all manner of grunts, tuts, hisses, croaks, death rattles and puffs. For too long we'd had to rely on asterisks and italics ('sigh', for example, was the noun or verb, while '*sigh*' was the actual sound. Of course.), with only 'er' making any sort of decent phonetic showing at all. Then came AP. From 'arf' (the etymology of which The Alphabet gives as 'traditional (YS)', but I reckon owes a lot Mork's usage in the seminal Mork and (Lord, we thought she was 'it' at the time, what does that tell us about how we'll see Jennifer Aniston in ten years, eh?) Mindy), via the classic 'gagh' and 'gnuk', right through to 'tch'. Jonathan, with his Booker-nominated 'I - ah - oooo - ah - erg' even managed to transcribe being desperately, stumblingly lost for words. My, but they were good at the ugly arrangement of unassociated vowels and consonants; only the messy slaughter of everyone involved could have stopped AP opening a consultancy for sci-fi novelists.

There are really only two useful non-verbal utterances on which AP failed to cast its spell. One is that sigh which includes, usually in its first third, a flapping of the lips - an indicator of disbelief as well as weariness.

Jonathan Nash

(Possibly Mills has overlooked AP62, in which gentleman editor Jonathan Davies reviewed the unfortunately-titled XP8 and expressed his feelings over the game's surprising tiresomeness with "Phrrrrrw." But anyway.)

The second is the 'mmmm' of Marge Simpson; the throaty, growling quality really carries its 'OK, I'll go along with this, but I don't believe it for a second' component, but is extraordinarily difficult to weave into your basic row of m's (just try, next time you're on a long car journey or waiting for your entrance during a performance of Cats, say).

But this is merely the kind of carping criticism which is provoked purely by excellence falling short of complete perfection. Let's put our post-modern cynicism aside for once and simply celebrate AP's undoubted achievements. Next time you're adding all the common curses, obscenities and demotic sexual nouns and verbs - which have tediously been omitted from your spellchecker - into your personal dictionary file just have a glance around. How many other clumps of letters in there owe their existence to AP? More than two, I'd guess. And thus, in its literary progeny, AP lives on.