A Mouthful of Air.

Like Cleopatra, the alphabet is distinguished by its infinite variety. If a writer cannot find a sufficiently apposite word in the dictionary, he can simply invent one - as Lewis Carroll did. George Orwell took it a stage further by inventing an entire language - Newspeak, the totalitarian tongue of Oceania in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Now Anthony Burgess, having similarly endowed the droogs of A Clockwork Orange with the power of speech, has produced a linguistic longueur aptly entitled A Mouthful of Air. This sprawling semantic study is pedagogically prolonged, and says little that has not been said already by John Searle, Noam Chomsky, George Steiner, and John Austin, among others. But, Burgess being Burgess, the book is provocatively polymathic, encompassing the Malay dialect, Roger Moore, The Divine Comedy, and gay Guardsmen. And a British class question: Why are Cockneys accused of sloppy diction when they talk of "singin' and dancin'," while the so-called upper classes can get away with "huntin', shootin', and fishin'"?