Lycra Liberals
Khandallah males on pricey bikes tearing through the northern suburbs (“Lycra Liberals”, June 3) is an interesting, though terrifying, image. Clifton suggests, though, that such males are quaffing nice wines and pedalling like fury in preference to holding inevitably disappointing ideals. I beg to differ. The chattering sets of Khandallah and neighbouring wannabe Ngaio have long ceased to hold any ideals – or even to chatter – beyond an ambition to ensure their children’s attendance at a decile 10 school and mindless hooting conversations about some dreadful American drama drivel currently screening, as a quick stroll past the school gates, or a wait in line for a lovely coffee and a glorious slice, will prove. Rather, then, I suggest that the bike rides are an attempt to escape the scourge of the Khandallah wife, all highlights and unused degrees, who is likely virulently urging the chained-up lycra male to attend a school quiz.
I concur with the writer, however, that “Wellingtonians … are a bit out of step with the national character.” Scarily, it is these very Khandallans, alienated from family, country and reality, who are busy scribbling policy to enchain the rest of us.
—Claire Williams (Waikanae, Kapiti)
Fatal Attractions
Recent cover stories in your magazine shout that even “reasonable” drinking could kill me within 20 years! And that Parkinson’s could strike at any time! I know this, and yet I continue to drink and smoke, and no doubt am susceptible to all the usual disorders. I live in a mortal body. I have vices that I will not shake. I actually prefer not to know about these possibilities – in the same way that I’d rather not know if an asteroid were heading for my city. Unfortunately, there is a cultural imperative in this country (called the culture of death by sociologists) that says if you don’t live into your eighties and beyond, you have failed as a human being. This runs alongside other national shibboleths, such as: “You must own your own house”; “You must renovate it and sell it for enormous profit and then relocate into a ‘better’ suburb”; “You must have children (childless couples can forget about Working for Families). Otherwise, you are a failure.
One of the things that I used to like about the Listener was that it left health-related scare tactics to other publications, and instead focused on things like the arts, politics, current affairs and economics. Of course, these things can be morbid in their own way (consider New Zealand fiction), but I’d prefer the inherently ephemeral nature of my physical existence to be a matter of discussion with my doctor.
—D Haldane Griffiths (Devonport, Auckland)
Bare Feet
The none-too-subtle analogy suggested in Bradford’s Hollywood (June 3) between Texas’s death penalty and its policy barring barefooted customers in grocery stores reveals a startling and, I have to say, chauvinistically Kiwi misunderstanding of public hygiene and the public policies instituted by many countries to protect public health.
First, unlike in the case of the death penalty, there is in the US a nationwide consensus against the filthy practice of going barefoot. Bare feet are barred in all public places in the whole of the US, not only in Texas. You cannot attend school, you cannot go to the shops, the library, work – anywhere – if you walk in with feet contaminated with the detritus of the public street: tubercular phlegm, faecal matter and its attendant parasite population, mud and dirt pure and simple.
That New Zealanders so often do go barefoot on the public street and in public places, I am afraid to say, is one of the few customary practices here that seem not only backward and uncivilised, but dangerously unhygienic and repulsive to North Americans.
—Erin Mackie (North Beach, Christchurch)
Language Issues
The word “issues” seems to be supplanting words such as “factors, matters, subject, problems, concerns, considerations, risks, threats, questions, complaints, arguments, protests, difficulties, complications, grievances”, most of which are scarcely issues. Yet I have heard “issues” used for all of these and more. One does not feel hurt, insulted, cross, disappointed, disturbed, offended, confused, by or with people. One has issues with them. I once heard a weather forecaster describing approaching weather by saying that the country was about to have issues.
The word “address” now also stands in for any of a range of expressions and not all have the same meaning. It is therefore a fudge word. Unsurprisingly, politicians and officials love to declare hat “The issue will be addressed.” It therefore makes no defined commitment, and so offers an easy escape for people under questioning. Because the expression “the issue will be addressed” is brief, it may seem decisive and clear. It is neither.
—Hugh Brewerton (Paraparaumu Beach)
I wish the announcers and programme producers of radio and TV would read a book on linguistics and find out the difference between emphatic and phatic communication.
Emphatic communication conveys hard information without redundancy, eg, the weather forecast, a commentary on a horse race, an auctioneer’s bids, the time and content of a future event. This information offers the listener no leeway: we listen hard and don’t ask for distractions because we want to know exactly.
Phatic communication’s main aim is to maintain social contact, using language’s little ups and down, asides and chat. We are soothed and pleased to be part of the party.
Now listen up! This is emphatic! We do not want the radio weather forecasts chatted up. We do not want mood music behind the TV stockmarket results. We do not want loud background effects, music, or flashing visuals behind an announcement of a future programme_s timing and content. Got it?
—Bea Hamer (Ngaio, Wellington)
Saving Kathryn Ryan
Graeme Lay (Letters, June 3), along with others including National Radio’s Kim Hill, doesn’t like “women” pronounced as “woman”. Hill on a Saturday morning programme a couple of years ago refused to carry on interviewing a hapless interviewee unless he changed his pronunciation of the word. The irony of this is that Hill herself cannot pronounce the word “film” correctly – but few of her guests have the courage to tackle her about that. For my part, when Hill starts talking about the “fillims” I usually switch to the soon-to-end Brian Edwards’s Top o’ the Morning show where, if I am lucky, I can still catch some wisdom from Max Cryer and learn that language does change and it is best to accept it and move on.
—Chris Laurenson (Highbury, Wellington)
Kindly add the following to Graeme Lay’s catalogue of “unspeakable linguistic offences”, particularly in regard to sport: sentences beginning with “Yeah, well …” and “Obviously”; the almost obligatory misuse of “whitewash” and “begging the question”; hopelessly overworked clichés like “bottom line”, “level playing field”, “across the board”, “this point in time” and “right to the wire”; the abandonment of anything wrongly adverbial as in “He played real good”; and the most insipid comment in our much-thrashed language, “Looking good!”
—Gordon Ogilvie (Cashmere, Christchurch)
Goal Attack
I’m going to take issue with your report (“A cup above the rest,” June 10) on two of England’s players. First, Michael Owen. Were you searching the dictionary for a likely description and just happened across the words “bored” and “prima donna”? He’s the least likely prima donna in world football: sensible, straightforward, straight-talking, with a track record for England that is beyond criticism. Bored? Playing for one of the most rabidly supported teams in the English league, well rewarded for what he does, happy to be playing again after his Spanish experience? Did you mean to say “boring”, perhaps? Alan Shearer was often accused of being boring – remember just how good he was?
Second: Peter Crouch. Although I will admit he doesn’t look like an England player [2m, 75kg], how many “journeymen” play regularly for Liverpool? Not one. “On the verge of being found out” of doing what, exactly? Maybe he’ll be found out to be a real threat coming on in the last 25 minutes of any game, his height and ball-retention capabilities baffling tired defenders of those teams who don’t have to cope with that kind of thing week in, week out.
Friendly matches don’t tell us every-thing of course, but the most recent England matches have shown Michael Owen returning to full fitness, scoring once, and “journeyman” Peter Crouch scoring four goals.
—Keith Shackleton (Arch Hill, Auckland)
Al Bone replies: Michael Owen has never lived up to his teenage promise. He was let go by Liverpool, he was let go by Real Madrid. He will be let go by Newcastle. “Journeymen” who have played for Liverpool of late: Emile Heskey, Milan Baros, Djbril Cisse. I’ll argue the toss about Owen, but Crouch is a waste of time. Three of his four goals came against Jamaica, the other against Hungary. His misses are legion and set to increase.
GE Rice
“Fresh ideas” (Health & Science, May 13) presents only one side of the complex story of golden rice. Far from being an “outstanding feat”, an independent audit commissioned by the Institute of Science in Society concluded that the project was “a useless application, a drain on public finance and a threat to health and biodiversity”.
The root of the vitamin A deficiency problem is economic: people do not eat plain rice out of choice. The poor do not get enough to eat and are undernourished as well as malnourished. Offering golden rice as the cure for vitamin A deficiency is absurd when there are plenty of other cheap, readily available sources such as green vegetables and unpolished rice.
The real cure is to re-introduce agricultural biodiversity in the many forms of sustainable agriculture already being practiced successfully by tens of millions of farmers all over the world. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation has projects to deal with vitamin A deficiency using a combination of food fortification, supplements and general improvements in diets by encouraging people to grow and eat a variety of green, leafy vegetables. These are workable solutions compared to the failed solution of golden rice, where an adult would need to eat in excess of 2kg to get the recommended daily amount of vitamin A.
It’s also worth asking why it is necessary to genetically engineer rice. Answers can be found in an article published in Science vol 287, “The Green Revolution Strikes Gold”. When rice is polished vitamin A is removed. Is it plausible that $US100 million, much of it public money, has been spent trying to put the vitamin A back in? A more likely explanation is that the scientists are looking for research funding without considering people’s real needs or aspirations.
A further rationale can be found in the article’s conclusion: “One can only hope that this application …will restore this technology to political acceptability”.
—David Moorhouse (Christchurch)
