Sra,—I find it hard to derive any pleasure, which was
presumably intended, from your contributor Simon Raven's hopes for the New Year.
While it is good to discourage naivety and mis- leading euphemisms, his tone seems to me peculiarly nasty. Could he, please, define what he means by a 'mad child'? The word is meaningless in any humane or scientific context, and is passing out of use except in colloquial senses like 'He was mad with me,' or 'You're mad [i.e., irrational] to go swimming in this weather.' Secondly, what does be propose as a common denominator to describe a group of children who are variously deaf, blind, autistic, spastic and highly intelligent, or suffering from muscular dystrophy, and whose afflictions do indeed act as the brake and hindrance on their activity which the word handicap denotes?
Third, except for some Nilotic exceptions, of which I have met very few in this country, black, or coloured, people are, by his strictly chromatic criteria, brown. He is fearfully muddled here!
Finally, what have the Jews done now, and why does he so need to resent them? —
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