I think I found a slim collection of his columns in the Yorkville Public Library in Toronto in the early ‘80s and was entranced. Then I subscribed to Punch which he edited. Punch was a British humour magazine. When it was taken over by moneymen with no sense of humour, it slid downhill and was put to death in 2002. When you buy a magazine that prospered since its birth in 1841, survived through the biggest technological life-changing events ever seen by mankind and manage to kill it in a trice, should you not be run through with a saber or some kind of swirling grinder? Thanks, Lord Stevens.

Coren was a polymath, in the sense that he could write and speak with wit and fluency about anything. I have two copies of his The Best of Alan Coren, one for each floor. It has a parody of The Great Gatsby in which Jay Gatsby has no money, not one thin dime. It has a retelling of The Canterbury Tales as peopled by holiday-makers lining up at Heathrow. This was included in an earlier anthology called Golfing for Cats, on the grounds that the current best-selling books were about, respectively, golf, cats and Nazis, so the book had a swastika on the cover.

I can't list all the brilliant columns and essays. I can only sum them up this way. Coren had a turn of phrase, a real gift for summary. He didn't do catchphrases, which are popular in my house. Catchphrases are brutally simple, so simple that they're written in code for the other person who watched the DVD with you. The idiotic young man on The Fast Show who runs along beside the camera praising the most mundane aspects of daily life:. "Old people. They're brilliant! They always invite you in. Even though it's not your house. They give you tea. Brilliant! They wear coats. Sometimes they wear two coats. Brilliant!"

Um, that's the catchphrase. BRILLIANT! No, I didn't think you'd laugh, but at our house we laugh.

But Coren's words were so dense, so thick with meaning and allusion and a sort of joy at the thickness and intensity of the world, the multitude of things that were in it and how funny they were. And so we plucked phrases out of his columns that were  Essence du Coren.

Coren took exception to the British Journal of Alcoholism painting Beethoven as an alcoholic-it referred to his liver as a "bean-sized nodule"-as if being one of the greatest composers of all time wasn't enough.

 "All human life is divided between those who order by the crate and those who believe that sherry trifle leads to the everlasting bonfire, and never the twain shall meet."

Or Coren's pocket-sized guide to Europe:

"Germans are split into two broad categories: those with tall spikes on their hats, and those with briefcases. Up until 1945, the country's history was made by those with spikes. After 1945, it was made by those with briefcases. Ethnically, the Germans are Teutonic, but prefer not to talk about it any more."

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, as you know, so Coren imagined the Poets Society meeting to discuss refurbishing the office toilets. The result was surreal. What colour should they paint it?

"Mr Shelley said he rather fancied azure, black, and streaked with gold, fairer than any wakened eyes behold.

Mr Marvell said what about orange bright, like golden lamps in a green night.

Or, interjected Mr Shakespeare, what about having the majestical roof fretted with golden fire? It might cost a bob or two, he added but it would not half impress publishers.

Mr. Gerard Manley Hopkins said that he personally had always rather gone for dappled thing.

Green, said Mr Walt Whitman, green, green, green, green, green.

The committee looked at him."

It becomes apparent that Coren was erudite to a degree I can't really encompass. He was a working man's son who got a First in English at Cambridge and he claimed not to remember much of what he studied. But everything he wrote was steeped in English literature and history.

Now we have Google. But the Encyclopedia Britannica used to come in about 24 volumes arranged alphabetically, each volume labelled according to its alphabetical range. If you had to write a brief explanation of each odd title-A.Anstey, Ant Balfe, Balfour Both, Botha Carthage, Carthusians Cockcroft, Cocker Dais, Daisy Educational, Edward Extract, Extradition Garrick, Garrison Halibut, Halicar Impale, Impatiens Jinotega, Jirasek Lighthouses, Lighting Maximilian, Maximus Naples, Napoleon Ozonolysis, P-Plastering, Plastics Razin, Razor Schurz, Schutz Speke, Spelman Timmins, Timoleon-Vieta and Vietnam Zworykin-could you write a bio for each peculiar combination of names and leave your readers shrieking and quoting it for decades?

No, but Coren could and did.

Garrison Halibut: I was bored by this long, scholarly thesis on the Minneapolis dry-goods salesman who rose to be the Governor of Minnesota and is chiefly remembered as the initiator of off-street parking.

P-Plastering: I opened this volume with considerable trepidation, believing it to be just another Do-It-Yourself tract. Imagine my delighted surprise to discover that it was in fact a history of stammering! Packed with fascinating information-did you know, for examp,e, that Geoge Washington was unable to enunciate "teaspoon," or that K-K-K-Katie was not written by Gustav Mahler?-the book is a veritable mine of glottal arcana. The appendix on Regency hiccups is on no account to be missed."

Here's the knowledge from which Coren drew to sum up the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1200 words: Obscure authors of the Victorian era, dwarf entertainments, the transsexuals of Georgian England (there's quite a lot of them), Hannibal's marches, Edwardian school masters, East End flyweight boxers, the 19^th century rural gentility,  18^th century rollicking busty lusty novels, the Bloody Assizes, Lutherans, Detroit's worst automotive ideas, modern bullfighting, Czech films, special effects in the English movie industry of the 1960s, the Romans misbehaving in Sicily, Greek oil billionaires, escape artistry, Chicago gangster wars, the new Esperaanto, 14^th century warlock diaries, plots Shakespeare might have lifted and the Vietnam-era Jewish anti-war dynasties.

More local Coren catchphrases:

 "Deft saffron digits."

"What an eye you have for detail and all self-taught."

"And think of all the fuss they made of Sheraton."

"A small thing but Minoan."

"That most indispensable of gardening tools, the wallet."

Christ, I can't flip through his work without finding more beauties. Two little boys collided with him knee-level at the Toy Museum. ""Sorry,' said one, ‘me and him was looking for the wossname.' It had, I don't know, a kind of poetry. I should like them to get the bits sorted out before they reach man's estate, but there is no gainsaying the appeal of a tot's gamey demotic."

Gamey demotic? That's as good as "bean-sized nodule."

I have the impression when I read Coren that a lot of English words are going unused and without Corens in this world, we will lose them. (Thankfully, Coren's daughter Victoria is a writer, incidentally grown seriously wealthy through poker.)

The other day, I wrote in a CBC.ca column online, "Very populous, India." I meant to refer to Noel Coward's phrase "Very flat, Norfolk." And then it occurred to me that very few readers would know who Coward was, much less his better lines. So I took it out.

Coren would have left it in. It would have worked for him, I think, but I lack his grounding, his playfulness, his lighthearted genius. The one thing I did learn from him, though, is that the English language is inexhaustible in its opportunities for pleasure, indeed, delight.

R.I.P. Alan Coren, 1938-2007.