7 days ago
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
Talk on Gaza is cheap. Why not take some proper action?
There may be a grain of truth in the Israeli foreign minister's retort that yesterday's joint statement is "disconnected from reality". There is something unreal about declaring opposition (or worse, expressing concern for Israel's reputation) and threatening further action while again doing nothing. There will be something equally unreal and disconnected in its maintaining it took every possible action to prevent it should all Gaza's people shortly be concentrated in the "humanitarian city" being built on the ruins of Rafah, to ready their displacement.
Martin Johnstone, Lochwinnoch.
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Drop-off charges are a disgrace
Mike Dooley (Letters, July 19) is right to question the puerile excuses of the chief executive of Airport UK for dropping-off charges. However I can confirm that my taxi to the airport does suffer a dropping-off fee. Nevertheless that taxi produces the same fumes and occupies the same road space as a family car would, so the dropping-off charge does not help any environmental or traffic relief as claimed in those excuses.
Outwith airports there are friends, family, or taxi drivers waiting in lay-bys or side streets to limit picking-up charges of pounds for minutes. Does this also help to reduce pollution or traffic flow?
After the Glasgow Airport ram raid in 2007 all airports had to install expensive barriers and traffic control systems. Parking and drop-off charges were needed to cover these costs. That money has been recovered long ago so why are the charges for parking maintained at a higher level and why is a dropping-off charge needed at all? How do most European airports manage to balance their books without dropping-off fees?
It is interesting that our hospitality industry questions possible tourist tax levies when airport charges must have a similar effect, albeit built into a different part of travel and stay costs home or away. We are perhaps fortunate that hospital parking is not priced in a similar manner.
JB Drummond, Kilmarnock.
Grease: a lost opportunity
Brian Ferguson anticipates change at Pitlochry Festival Theatre ("Will Alan Cumming help Pitlochry become Scotland's next culture capital?", The Herald, July 22). Unfortunately a great opportunity has been missed this season.
Last Saturday my wife and I were in the audience at the theatre for a performance of Grease. Musically, the show was excellent, with a cast of superb musicians and singers. (Take an extra bow, the girl on the bass guitar.) However, our enjoyment of the production was much diminished as the diction of the spoken passages was virtually unintelligible, due largely to the use of stupid American accents.
Grease is, of course, originally set in late-fifties USA. But what an opportunity was missed to transpose the show to 1959 Scotland and present it in a Scottish idiom with local dialect and accents. Perhaps a little imagination by an artistic director will reap dividends.
By the time we return, later in the summer, for The Great Gatsby, I hope some change may have been effected.
Eric Begbie, Stirling.
Foreign Secretary David Lammy (Image: Maja Smiejkowska/PA Wire) Ze answer
I fully agree with your correspondents who dislike the use of "they/them" as being ungrammatical and confusing (Letters, July 18, 19, 21 & 22).
May I point out that there already exists a gender-neutral pronoun in English? Though little used, it would be ideal for those not wishing to employ he or she. The word is "ze", pronounced "zee". It should, I think, be more widely used, and should be widely publicised.
Do other correspondents agree?
H Shearer, Cumbernauld.
Grammar and the control freak
I have been enjoying the recent correspondence about the poor use of grammar.
Of course, football players, commentators and managers seem to take this to extremes.
I'm sure many of the common mistakes they make are familiar to most of us: "The boy done good"; "The ball clearly has went over the line"; "He literally killed him with that tackle".
Is it fair though that we expect those involved in the beautiful game to speak as eloquently as Cicero? Can we not offer congratulations when they have obviously been swotting up on the beautiful language?
Listening to the radio as I drove home on the last day of the previous football season, I heard an interview with an under-pressure football manager prior to a very important game. I must applaud him for his wonderful use of the rhetorical device polyptoton: a figure of speech in which the same word is used in different forms in the same sentence. The example used by the beleaguered yet eloquent manager? "We can only control what we can control so we're going to be controlling the controllables."
I'm not sure if his team won or if the match was lost due to his players' uncontrollability, but his copy of The Dark Arts of Rhetoric was obviously money well spended.
Gordon Fisher, Stewarton.
• While working in an inner city school in the late 1950, I heard 'I seen", "I done", 'I have went" and 'my pencil's broke" so often that I became converted and I began to believe that they were correct.
Isobel McEwan, Skelmorlie.
