So, you quip, joining headline writers the world over, the father of deconstructionism has himself deconstructed. Jacques Derrida died in a Paris hospital on Friday at the age of 74 from pancreatic cancer, and you are paying tribute in the only way you know how: putting on a cod French accent and affecting a knowledge of his work.

Patricia Sullivan in the Washington Post helps you begin at the beginning: pronounce his name deh-ree-DAH and lay out his philosophy. "Language, he said, is inadequate to provide a clear and unambiguous view of reality. In other words, the fixed meaning of [a text] dissolves when hidden ambiguities and contradictions are revealed. These contradictions ... reveal deep fissures in the foundation of the western world's civilisations, cultures and creations." If only it were that easy: the New York Times reminded you that "Derrida and his colleagues were unwilling - some say unable - to define deconstructionism with any precision, so it has remained misunderstood, or interpreted in endlessly contradictory ways."

Tapping your pipe on the table for emphasis, and quoting from the Times's obituary, you remark that "this is perhaps no more true than of Derrida himself, whose many works attest to a myriad number of personalities."

One personality that he never achieved, as John Sturrock reminded you in the Independent, was that of a sportsman. The Algerian-born thinker "had adolescent ambitions to play professional football but then realised he wasn't good enough".

Express your relief that he found glory in another field and "enjoyed a global fame that his compatriots could hardly imagine" ( Le Figaro). Such success inevitably brought detractors, you sigh, glancing at the Times again. Derrida's work is not "nihilistic, as some overly simplistic commentaries have remarked. Instead it [admits] that no meaning, no identity, is ever stable or fixed, but is dependent on multiple contexts, none of which is ever discrete or finite."

Finish your exposition by following Derrida's instruction that we compliquons les choses , and remind your audience that you are essentially unreliable. Borrow Edward Rothstein's deconstructionist approach in the New York Times: "Any attempt to explain or reason or demonstrate already contains the seeds of its undoing ... Find its hidden premises, its unacknowledged preferences ... and its authority is undone." Or, as a witty Times leader put it, "Can there be any certainty in the death of Derrida?"