To be or not to be …

It's 45 years since David Bourland suggested doing away with the verb "to be". A silly suggestion, one might think, but look a little closer and it makes a weird kind of sense Forty-five years ago, the author David Bourland published an essay proposing a radical overhaul of English based on eliminating all forms of the verb "to be". In a world where we all spoke E-Prime, as Bourland called this new language, you couldn't say "Sandra Bullock's latest film is shockingly mediocre"; you'd have to say...