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Phoney war
Sir: I was sorry to see that Con Coughlin (‘Agent Brown’s new plan to smash terror’, 26 January) has now joined the likes of poor William Shawcross on the pottier side of paranoia in asserting that the occasional acts of Islamist terrorism in the United Kingdom over recent years mean that ‘we are a nation at war’. Coughlin even justifies George W. Bush’s now stale rhetoric about ‘the war on terror’, and reckons that Gordon Brown ‘is not a man who fits easily or naturally into the role of a wartime leader’.
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Herbert Thornton
January 31st, 2008 7:46pmTheodore Papadakis mentions two Greek words for which there is no equivalent word in English - and which presumably demonstrate 'gaps' in English vocabulary. Then, for some reason, he offers the example of the sun, in Greek, 'reigning as a king' as compared to the single English word that says it 'sets' - a phenomenon that he describes as 'sad'. Isn't that a bit incongruous?
I know no Greek, but to my ear the phrase 'reins as a king' - if that is the only way Greek can say that the sun sets - sounds (in English at least) ungainly and lacks even the excuse of being poetic. Does it sound better in Greek, or is in rather, a sad example of a gap in the Greek language?