Make up a story based on the dialogue.

• What you need you realize yourself, and it is education. You should go back and finish gram­mar-school, and then go through the high-school and University.

• I’ve got to study by myself I guess, an’ what I want to know is where to begin.

• I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar book. Your grammar is...not particularly good.

• I know I must talk a lot of slang an’ words you don’t understand. But, then, they’re only words I know.. .how to speak. I’ve got other words in my mind - picked’em up from books - but I can’t pronounce’em, so I don’t use’em.

• It isn’t what you say so much as how you say it. You don’t mind me being frank, do you? I don’t want to hurt you.

• No, no! Fire away; I’ve got to know, and I’d sooner know from you than anybody else.

• Well, then, you say “You was”; it should be “You were”. You say “I seen” for “I saw”. Y6u use the double negative —

• What’s the double negative? You see, I don’t even understand your explanations.

• I’m afraid I didn’t explain that. A double negative is...let me see...well, you say, “never helped nobody”, “Never” is a negative. “Nobody” is another negative. It is a rule that two negatives make a positive. “Never helped nobody” means that, not helping nobody, they must have helped somebody.

• That’s pretty clear. I never thought of it before, and I’ll never say it again.

• You’ll find it all in the grammar book. There’s something else I noticed in your speech. You say “don’t” when you shouldn’t. “Don’t” is a contraction, and stands for two words. Do you know them?

• “Do not”.

• And you use “don’t” when you mean “does not”.

• Give me an illustration.

• Well.. .’’it don’t do to be hasty”. Change “don’t” to “do not”, and it reads, “It do not do to be hasty”, which is wrong. It must jar on your ear.

• Can’t say that it does.

• Why didn’t you say, “Can’t say that it do?”

• That sounds wrong. As for the other, I guess my ear ain’t had the training yours has.

• There is no such word as “ain’t”. And you say “ben” for “been”, “I come” for “I came”; and the way you chop your endings is something dreadful.

• What do you mean? How do I chop?

• You don’t complete the endings. “A-n-d” spells “and’. You pronounce it “an”, “I-n-g” spells “ing”. Sometimes you pronounce it “ing”, and sometimes you leave off the “g”. And then you slur by dropping initial letters and diphthongs. “T-h-e-m” spells “them”. You pronounce it - oh, well, it is not necessary to go over all of them. What you need is a grammar book. I’ll get one and show you how to begin.

From Martin Eden by J. London)

Grammar school - (in Britain, especially formerly) a school for children over the age of 11, who are specially chosen to study for examinations which may lead to higher education. AmE - (becoming rare) for elementary school

High school - AmE a secondary school especially for children over age 14.

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William Somerset Maugham (1874 -1965) was born in Paris in the family of a solicitor at the British Embassy. His parents died when he was still a child, and he was brought up by his uncle, vicar of Whitstable in Kent. Maugham was educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and Heidelberg University, Germany. He also took his medical training at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, but the success of his first novel (“Liza of Lambeth”, 1897) won him over to letters. Maugham established his reputation as a novelist, a dramatist and a short-story writer. His most popular novels are “The Moon and Sixpence” (1919), “Cakes and Ale” (1930), “The Painted Veil” (1925), “Theatre” (1937), “77ze Razor’s Edge” (1944). In his lifetime he published more than ten collections of stories. Maugham’s works demonstrate his realistic manner, dem­ocratic tendencies and brilliant mastery of form.