Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Kate Smith writes in the Glasgow, Scotland, Sunday Herald:

As a first-year university student I remember interrupting a lecturer who assuredly told the lecture hall in his beautiful Queen's English that you could not construct a sentence using only vowels. I raised my hand and shouted out with delight: "Professor, you can: a e i o' ," I told him, pronouncing them phonetically - "ah eh ih oh". He looked perplexed and asked me to repeat it in English, which I duly did to gales of laughter from my fellow students; "I ate it all". I knew that spoken Scottish doesn't always need consonants but I didn't know faces could go such a deep shade of purple. An ingénue can challenge convention just by being young, exuberant or in my case, idiotic.