Ignorance and sloppiness are the worst enemies of good English. But pedantry is its most irritating friend, and not always a friend at that. Those who dislike their language being debased must always ask themselves just what they mean by ?debased?.

In its vocabulary, for instance, English is and always has been a hotchpotch. To protest against the arrival of fresh ingredients is, as an old employer of mine used to say, farting against thunder.

The speech of the ancient Britons survives as Welsh and, feebly, as Gaelic. It is found also in place and family names (Aberdeen, the mouth of the river Dee; the Scottish Mac; and Welsh names like Pritchard). Yet modern English owes little to its Celtic past. Whisky, the Gaelic usquebaugh, is the only word most of us would attribute to those days, and in fact it is a quite recent addition.

Latin took a firm hold among the elite during 350 years of Roman occupation. Yet it largely vanished, except in the church, as successive invaders? Jutes, Angles, Saxons and later the Vikings ? poured in from northern Europe. It took the Normans, northmen too but using the Latin-based language of their adopted country, to give us some of our Latinate vocabulary. A lot more came later. Greek words arrived via Latin, or, notably in modern times, from scholarly or scientific invention.

Britain owes the Normans the familiar verbal curiosities of its cuisine. The peasants kept cows and pigs, Germanic words by origin. But their Norman masters ate beef (today?s French boeuf, as in the Latin-derived bovine) and pork (Latin porcus, today?s porker, conventionally a fat pig but more often, as porky, slang for a fat lie; it took the EU bureaucracy to concoct pigmeat).

Overseas trade, war and empire added their seasoning to the stew. The Dutch tossed in such seafaring words as skipper, boom and yacht. The Spanish added tomato and tornado. Nankeen (Nanking), muslin (Mosul), madras, calico and others came from the Asian towns that supplied those cloths. Army slang brought back India?s khaki and take a dekko, and its Arabic-derived equivalent, take a shufti.

Modern immigration has added curiously little. Yiddish has made its mark on American English, but not much in Britain. Kosher is common enough, but only silly columnists aping America or self-consciously advertising their roots go schlepping down to the shops. The later waves of Caribbean and then subcontinental immigrants have so far added little but the names of their foods, bhangra beat and the like. Brought up in an ex-army, foreign-returned household, I knew a grand gathering as a tamasha long before I saw a brown face, but I doubt many others did.

There is more, much more, and centuries have stirred the lot into today?s English. The purist could not win. But that didn?t stop him from trying.

One effort sprang from the old obsession with Greek and Latin. By all means, pedants used to say, draw words from one or the other, but not both together. In fact we?ve been doing that (as in archduke) for centuries, and with wild abandon recently. Telephone combines two Greek words, the later television is Greek-cum-Latin. Immoral is Latinate, amoral another hybrid; likewise supermarket and hypermarket.

Classical learning has been dragged into spelling too. Do you end words in -ize (as Americans do, and Britons used to), or in -ise? Pedants liked to argue that these sprang from Greek verbs ending in -izo, so -ise was plain wrong. Nonsense. Leave aside the way this misled some Americans into oddities such as analyze, where Greek has an ?s? anyway. The fact is that many such words are from Latin (advertise, for instance) or reached English via French, which uses an ?s?. Five centuries ago, Thomas More, well versed in Greek, wrote fantasys thyne own death. Enough said.

The pedant?s pet hates today are (as ever) slang and (as since the talkies) Americanisms. Both are lost battles. Your wordcager wishes one of them ? yes, you guessed ? were not. But he remembers the advice of his old employer.