Unspeakable usages
From Steven Poole
Sir: In his review of my book, Unspeak (Books, 18 February) Graham Stewart asks rhetorically, ‘Can it be — as the casual reader might assume — that human rights activists, NGOs and liberal interest groups do not also deploy words in a manner that advertises their virtues but not their vices?’ This is tellingly disingenuous language. Presumably, as your reviewer Stewart has read the book more than ‘casually’, he knows full well that it discusses many uses of Unspeak by such groups. Why, then, does he feel the need to pretend that it does not? Is he perhaps auditioning for a role in the ‘right-wing conspiracy script’ he accuses me of following?
Steven Poole
Paris, France From Sir John Weston
Your reviewer of Steven Poole’s Unspeak claims to alert the dictionary to the coining of a new word by this book title. In fact, the word ‘unspeak’ first occurs in Macbeth (Act IV scene iii), in the sense of ‘to retract, renounce, take back’; and is already listed, with the reference, in Chambers Dictionary. Poole has merely assigned this old word a noun value and a second meaning.
John Weston Richmond, Surrey
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