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Unread 11-18-2010, 02:02 AM
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John Whitworth John Whitworth is offline
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Default Competition: Major to Minor

Competition: Major to Minor
SATURDAY, 20TH NOVEMBER 2010
Lucy Vickery presents this week's competition

In Competition No. 2673 you were invited to submit a pompous leader on a trivial subject. Among the topics that unleashed your inner Thunderer were the abuse of the ‘eight items or less’ lane in supermarkets (to say nothing of the lamentable confusion between ‘less’ and ‘fewer’) and the plague of rubber bands visited on us by the Post Office. There is space only to congratulate Brian Murdoch, who gets £30. His fellow winners get £25 each.

Most will pass in silence over the 40th anniversary next year of a blow struck — and still felt — at the very heart of the culture of the nation. Yet one may still hear, from the august counters of Fortnum and Mason all the way down to the ubiquitous emporia of Tesco et hoc genus omne, references not to ‘one penny’, but — it pains us to utter the phrase — ‘one pence’. It is not, we feel, too far-fetched to see this barbaric but pervasive solecism, this manifest inability in a supposedly pluralist society to distinguish the plural from the singular, born out of Britain’s spineless capitulation to Europeanism in currency management, as the first sign of that phenomenon dubbed by the Americans a ‘dumbing down’ (as if there were any other direction in which ‘dumbing’ might occur!), a significant first step towards the present degradation of our entire education system.
Brian Murdoch

It seems to us that one largely overlooked instance of the deterioration of written and spoken English as commonly used is the impending disappearance of the who/whom distinction. Where relative pronouns are concerned, subject and object are one not only to the ill-educated ‘chav’ but even to many of those whose business is words. It may often be that no purely semantic problems are created by using ‘who’ exclusively; but this is scarcely the hub of the matter. Though not all solecisms impede understanding, they remain cardinal errors. (Neither do we excuse those who commit the horrid genteelism of using ‘whom’ instead of ‘who’ preceding a clause in parentheses — ‘The man whom I thought was my friend’.) Once the wall of correct grammar is breached, the very foundations of the language are threatened, and the sense of a properly underpinned cultural and national identity faces dissolution.
G.M. Davis

Whither the wider world of philately in the voluminous plumes of hot air vented around the future of the Post Office? That frisson from a first-day cover or foreign franking, that delight in uncovering an imperfect printing: are these experiences to vanish forever under increased cyber domination and automation in the post room? Those whose childhood evenings were lit by the vibrant colours from Kenya and shaped by exotic triangular shapes from San Marino, or informed by serious bespectacled portraits from Belgium, will want today’s young people to share their obsession with stamp hinges and ‘completing the set’. Thus is the spirit of enquiry born in the germ of scholarship; here lies the foundation for discipline and self-motivation that will underpin a respect for order in future employment. The young philatelists of today are the workers of tomorrow. It behoves us all to stamp our letters for their sakes.
D.A. Prince

Nowhere is the relentless drift from liberty to licence made more manifest than in the matter of male habiliments. As a case in point, a senior politician has recently appeared on a public platform wearing a jacket but no tie. As a deliberate gesture — and it is hardly to be supposed that the omission was inadvertent — this betokens not merely an arrogant indifference to established convention but, worse, a flaunting disregard for the proprieties of high office. It proclaims an attitude of ease and casualness where the call should always be to diligence and rigour. In a wider context it gives us the sense of a thread being plucked irreplaceably from the intricate tapestry of civilised life. It is an act whose consequences, intended or not, will reverberate down the years. What has been unloosed is not simply a button: it is a cascade of plunging standards.
W.J. Webster

The high incidence of anachronism in the costume drama Downton Abbey exemplifies much that is wrong with Britain today. Surely, the integrity of a cultural, albeit televisual, flag bearer is fatally undercut when the flag borne proves inauthentic. We urge readers to decline Julian Fellowes’s call to forgive the infelicities of his programme — temporally incorrect street furniture, inexactitude regarding the entail, incongruously cuffed jodhpurs — and his injunction to address the ‘big picture’. A big picture is, necessarily, a collection of such details and our national decade-long blindness to economic and social crises is in no small measure due to our heeding just such injunctions from the self-appointed great and good. Too often in British life, the failure to identify mistakes has simply portended their multiplication. This newspaper will continue to catalogue howlers, albeit with a heavy heart, certain that pedantry is a dirty word only to the inattentive scholar.
Adrian Fry

Tempus, as Ovid remarks, edax rerum. One has only to visit the self-styled High Streets of our county towns, and our cities, and to take a turn in what are laughably called ‘charity shops’ to see that his words still ring true — in fact, they are positively tintinnabulous. There was a time when an honest and philanthropic person could exchange his decent coin for the common good. Now he must offer it by proxy for the etiolated tat of anonymous strangers, or for the sentimental produce of sufferers (or more probably, their agents). A sanctimonious chain of outlets foists third-hand, discarded gifts — or the effluvia of consumerism — upon passers-by desirous of assisting the less privileged. The transaction of humanity has been debased. Driving out the entrepreneurial spirit — for these emporia are charged nugatory rent — is the surest sign that generosity has been tarnished, regulated, practically nullified. Let them be banned.
Bill Greenwell
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