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Letters

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Target practice

Sir: Pauline Holroyd’s experience regarding choice in NHS referrals (Letters, 19 January) becomes even more frustrating when government targets interfere. I was referred in much the same way last November and made an appointment with the only realistically available hospital clinic on the list offered. A few days before the appointment on 8 January the hospital called to cancel it owing to the clinic not operating on that day. (No other explanation.) I rebooked for the next available date: 23 January.

I was then offered an important job interview on that very day and called to change the appointment. I was refused a new one as it would take me over the target of seeing me within 18 weeks from the date of the referral. I was told that if I cancelled, I was to contact my GP for a new referral so that the next appointment would be within a new 18-week target period. In this way, clearly the NHS can show it never misses the target.

Stephen Saunders
West Sussex

Wing and a prayer

Sir: Atatürk banned the call to prayer in Arabic throughout Turkey as long ago as 1932 (The Spectator’s Notes, 12 January). He decreed that it could henceforth only be in Turkish, Arabic being an alien language incomprehensible to Turks. He also banned the use of loudspeakers, microphones and recordings, and decreed that the person issuing the call to prayer should climb to the top of the minaret in order to do so — a considerably more strenuous task in the tall, elegant style of Turkish mosque architecture than in the squat Pakistani style adopted in Britain.

Osman Streater
London NW3

Top tip

Sir: I was reminded by Martin Vander Weyer’s footnote of Hugh Massingberd’s huge appetite and of his extraordinary generosity (Any other business, 26 January). Hugh and I trundled round the UK giving his compilation from the diaries of James Lees-Milne — ‘Ancestral Voices’ — in country houses. We were often put up for a single night. Hugh always left £20 on the dressing table with a note of thanks.

Moray Watson
London SW13

Mind the gaps

Sir: Matthew Parris’s article on the ‘surprising gaps’ the English language has in its vocabulary (Another voice, 19 January), reminds me of all the times I have asked British friends to give me the equivalent of a modern Greek word by describing to them what it means. To my surprise their answer has often been that such a word does not exist. There’s no noun in English specific to the sound waves make on rocks; no word reserved to describe the feeling of being in love. Isn’t it sad that in England the sun just sets? In Greece when it does so, it reigns as a king.

Theodore Papadakis
London N6

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Herbert Thornton

January 31st, 2008 7:46pm

Theodore 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?

Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Diary

Penny Smith

Penny Smith gives a rundown of her week

The NHS needs its Reformation

The Spectator on reforming the NHS

Glasgow East is Brown’s dirty little secret: a hideous, costly social experiment gone wrong

Fraser Nelson

Glasgow East symbolises — as few other places in Britain can — the fact that the problem Labour faces is not just lack of leadership but lack of mission. What is to be seen in this constituency encapsulates and dramatises Labour’s abject failures to comprehend, let alone tackle, the nature of the poverty which grips our council estates.
For all the latest on the Glasgow East by-election, visit Coffee House