Gender bender
Sir: Bruce Anderson (Politics, 28 Novem- ber) apologises for inadvertently giving Saddam Hussein a feminine gender by paraphrasing Cato's harangue against Carthage. Readers of The Spectator took him up on this.
On Wednesday, the Sun, having covered its front page with a rhetorical question (Is THIS the, most dangerous man in EUROPE?') about Oskar Lafontaine, reproduced this in the same format on page three — in German.
Unfortunately the title 'Sun' was kept, prefixed with 'der'. If the Sun had a letters column, millions of its readers would doubt- less have pointed out that the German word for 'sun' is feminine, whereby the genitive `der' would be 'die' in the nominative.
Bearing in mind that in Old English (when we last distinguished grammatical gender) the sun was also feminine, there can be no excuse for this schoolboy howler in Wapping.
lain Burgess
4 Cedars Road, Hampton Wick, Middlesex
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