Mind your language
VERONICA is always sending e-mails to her schoolfriends and, no doubt, to other unsavoury cyber-pals, too. She never sends one tome, but her style is probably as loose and copious as most people's in this medium. There had once been hopes that e-mail would revive the moribund art of letter- writing. No sign of that, as far as quality goes.
In any case, put a pen into someone's hand and something seems to short- circuit in the brain. It is not just Sir Richard Wilson (Mind your language, 12 February). Indeed, he probably has a perfectly innocent explanation for the letter to the Financial Times that appeared above his name.
There was a strange example in the Times too. It appeared last October, but a reader has now sent me a copy, pointing out in it a champion sentence of 76 words. The letter came from a firm of solicitors who were representing a Norfolk farmer charged with murder after an intruder on his property was shot. Here is the sentence in question:
The media have been requested to publi- cise such matters as are allowed by law in order that other people who have been in similar situations can write to us so that, where relevant, the fears and anxi- eties of families who face intruders at night in their own home can be seen, and that we may know where similar inci- dents have arisen and what action those people have taken in order to protect themselves and their property.
It is not exactly that the wording is obscure or the grammar mistaken. But the thing is so unspecific on the sur- face. In that way (and that way only) it reminds me of an anonymous threat; you know the sort of thing: 'If certain people don't stop poking their noses into things that don't concern them, then certain people are going to find that something happens that they might wish hadn't happened — A Wellwisher.'
By the way, on a perennial matter, two new sightings have been made recently in the pandemic of pathetic mission-statement logos. First, a sign in squiggly metallic writing added presum- ably on the orders of Sir John Stevens, the new Metropolitan Police Commis- sioner, to the rotating triangle outside New New Scotland Yard: 'Metropolitan Police: working for a safer London.' That'll have the criminals shivering with fear. Another, a caption on a television advertisement: `Seeboard: Bringing home electricity and gas.' What do they mean, 'Bringing home'?
Dot Wordsworth
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