HE Bermudian diction leaves much to be desired according to noted writer Henry Louis Gates Jr. who in the pages of no less than , mocked our inability to pronounce the word "ask".

His view was supported by former education official Dr. Eva Hodgson, who went one step further with the suggestion that lessons in articulation be taught in the island's schools.

"It's interesting that he just picked out that one distortion," she said. "I don't know about Americans particularly, but I know that Bermudians distort a lot of different words. I recently heard a young student from one of the schools give a talk. The talk was great but the diction and the speech made me want to ask, 'Why doesn't the school teach you how to speak?'"

Determined to discover the origins of certain words which pepper the black vernacular, Mr. Gates pounced on what he saw as one of the more common abuses ? "ax" for "ask". He believed the problem to be limited to the United States. But then he visited Bermuda.

"I have to confess that the use of 'ax' for 'ask' has always been, for me, the linguistic equivalent of fingernails' scraping down a blackboard," he wrote. "The first time I heard the word 'ask' pronounced that way was on a Bill Cosby album in the 60's: 'I'm-o, I'm-o ax you a question' his character stammers, and in my Appalachian hamlet we'd laugh at that, certain that nobody would really be foolish enough to say 'ax' for 'ask'. Don't get me wrong: it's not as if the black citizens of Piedmont, West Virginia spoke the king's English, but 'axing' was something we did in the woods.

"It was when I first visited Bermuda, where just about everyone I met says 'ax', that I began to suspect that this usage had deeper origins than I'd known. Sure enough, as William Labov, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, explained to me, 'aks' is traceable to the Old English 'acsian', a non-standard form of 'ascian', the root of 'ask'."

Dr. Hodgson said she had no idea where the misuse stemmed from but admitted to finding such malapropisms as annoying as Mr. Gates' does: "Very often, I find myself cringing when somebody says 'ax' instead of 'ask'," she said. "I don't know why it's done, but I do know that it is so. Certainly I think it's something that teachers should be alerted to. Raising the discussion is something I would certainly be in favour of.

"I don't think schools have ever done a great deal about diction unless they had (a teacher) specifically geared towards speech.

"In the past, it's been mentioned to me, when a school has a good choir that they probably had some speech training, but I'm not in a position to know whether that's true or not. I do know I wish there was more attention given to the way young people speak."

Mr. Gates and Dr. Hodgson parted when it came to a probable reason for the misuse however, the former educator believing they were more likely to have been borne through blacks' African heritage.

"It would be more logical for it to be a confusion from some African phrase. If it was an old English phrase then why do just blacks distort it? Why not whites also?

"Someone like Gates, who's done a lot of travelling in Africa, should know whether or not in the African language there is something which has led blacks to pronounce certain words in a certain fashion. In some cases some words and phrases exist because they have taken the African language and mixed it with the English in some fashion. But with (ask), I don't know. And I'm surprised that Gates doesn't know."

Mr. Gates, an educator, scholar, literary critic and writer, is one of the most prominent and well-known academics in the United States today.

Chief Education Officer Dr. Joseph Christopher did not return a call for comment.