Daft bucker
Sir: Nigel Spivey ('Meditations on an F- theme', 20 June) belongs to a grand old Spectator tradition.
I remember in 1949 or 1950 Wilson Har- ris using the Diary to deplore the BBC's Third Programme using the word `bugger' on the air (in a translation of Plautus, I believe).
Some time in the late 1950s another diarist retailed the story of Tallulah Bankhead meeting Norman Mailer (in whose The Naked and the Dead, as Mr Spivey notes, the word was spelt fug), and remarking, `I know you. You're the man who can't spell f— On a different aspect of the use of lan- guage, surely Mr Spivey is to be discour- aged from saying that when the Indepen- dent scored 23 f-words over a period, this was 'much more' than other papers. Why not many more?
Paul McQuail 158 Peckham Ryc, London SE22.
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