A 71-year-old man called Neville Gwynne has been stirring up the great and good with his primer on the subject of English grammar. Prince Charles, reportedly, has sent his written congratulations.

Mr Gwynne believes that the key to right speaking is right thinking, and the key to that is right grammar. While there is truth in that, where would we be if everybody spoke and wrote faultlessly?

The basis of virtually every hilarious television comedy sketch by the Two Ronnies was the mis-hearing and misuse of words and phrases. The English-speaking world would be duller without malapropisms such as “her house was state of the ark” or “patience is a virgin”.

And indeed where would Yorkshire’s favourite school inspector, the writer Gervase Phinn, be without such slips of the tongue? The above-quoted examples come from his latest Dalesman book, Mangled English, attractively illustrated by his son Matthew.

The diminutive Hylda Baker built a successful stage act on this, invariably greeting the audience by saying, “I don’t believe you’ve had the pleasure of me.”

As a boy Gervase Phinn was taken to see her at Blackpool. He loved the comic word-play. Spoonerisms, a form of verbal gaffe in which the letters of words are misplaced, were another stock-in-trade of comic knock-about routines, not so much in evidence in these days of observational stand-up.

The Reverend William Spooner, warden of New College, Oxford, reputedly spoke so fast he was apt to jumble key words – allegedly. Proposing a toast to Queen Victoria, he actually said: “Three cheers for our queer old dean.”

Gervase Phinn accepts that without question. For me, that spoonerism at least seems a bit too contrived.

I can imagine the Rev Bill carefully rehearsing his gaffes by gaslight, a glass of something stimulating to hand.

In the introduction to his new book, Mr Phinn, a former Yorkshire schools inspector, extols the “tricky and troublesome, idiosyncratic, illogical and ambiguous” nature of the English language. Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Noel Coward, Spike Milligan, John Lennon, The Two Ronnies and Victoria Wood, made the most of it. So did Lewis Carroll.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean.” Carroll had great sport turning words upside down and inside out in Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through The Looking Glass.

Mr Dumpty would have readily agreed with the following extract from an anonymous poem quoted by Gervase Phinn:- I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough?

Others may stumble, but not you on hiccough, thorough, laugh and through?

Books like this are a gift for after-dinner speakers. Among the many quotable anecdotes is this one, witnessed by Gervase Phinn. A young pupil told his teacher that in sums the total is what you get when you add up all the numbers.

“And what is the remainder?” she said.

“The remainder, miss, is the animal what pulls Santa’s sleigh.”

Mangled English, by Gervase Phinn, published by Dalesman at £9.99.