- The Guardian Sat urday 30 Apr il 2022
6 Letters
John Wesley, the founder of
Methodism, described his
preaching for the fi rst time
outside the confi nes of the
pulpit as “submitting to be more
vile”. Hitherto he had seen
this as something alien to his
understanding of his mission.
That was my feeling when, at
the start of a year as lord mayor of
Bradford in 2016, I was expected
to use Twitter on a daily basis.
Apparently it was a 21st-century
civic tradition and it was expected
of me. The only way I could cope
with this alien activity was by
refl ecting on the day’s activities
for up to half an hour and carefully
crafting a suitable sentence arising
out of one event, a harmless ritual
that some people appreciated.
Marina Hyde’s assertion that
arguing on the internet qualifi es
you as a twat is perfectly sound
Offi ce attendance is no
guarantee of effi ciency
Elon Musk’s takeover marks a
good time to turn off Twitter
The presence or absence of any
realisation of the defi nite article in
Yorkshire dialects (Letters, 27 May)
depends on which part of the county
you’re talking about. An article in
Leeds Studies in English in 1952 was
the fi rst to map the fact that in the
local dialect of Hull and surrounding
areas there is no defi nite article at
all. A friend who grew up in Hull
said that, when learning to read,
she was intrigued by this little
word “the ” that didn’t exist in
her speech. She mastered it and
learned to use it correctly in writing,
and her adult speech featured the
standard pronunciations.
Greg Brooks
Emeritus professor of education,
University of Sheffi eld- As a Lancastrian, may I say
that Yorkie Jeremy Muldowney
’its nail right on th’ead (Letters,
26 April). The conventional use of
T’sing out the many
dialects of Yorkshire
Message in
a bottle top
‘Plastic, plastic
everywhere- this bottle
top provided
a neat frame
for a passing
cargo ship’
JIMMY CUNNINGHAM/
GUARDIAN COMMUNITY
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of Commons, and does it also mean
that he will now be campaigning for
a new parliament building that will
obviate the exorbitantly high costs
of repairing and maintaining the
Palace of Westminster? I doubt it.
Jane Roff ey
Arnside, Cumbria- Like Simon Jenkins, I’m bemused
by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s demand
that civil servants return to
their offi ce ( Working 9-5 doesn’t
mean being chained to a desk.
Someone tell Jacob Rees-Mogg,
theguardian.com, 25 April ).
For the last three decades, the
Conservatives have preached
“labour market fl exibility”, and
insisted that workers must embrace
occupational change by accepting
new modes of working. Yet now it
is Tories such as Rees-Mogg who
seem to be insisting on labour
market rigidity and outdated
working practices – the very things
that Conservatives have always
accused the trade unions of.
Pete Dorey
Bath
that off ers us all a future, it has
absolutely nothing to do with
Musk and his ilk.
Alastair Penny
Durbuy, Belgium- Joel Golby suggests that the best
thing Elon Musk can do is delete
Twitter ( theguardian.com, 27
April ). He’s not going to do that.
However, those who are concerned
about a self-promoting billionaire
controlling online discourse have
a simple solution : delete your own
Twitter account.
I know that these online
platforms have a way of becoming
addictive and users feel that they
cannot live without their “drug of
choice” – but really, we lived for
thousands of years without Twitter.
Anything that was so popular
with Donald Trump must be
suspect – and if enough people
just delete their accounts, it will
die. That would be worthwhile
and really funny : to see Musk so
spectacularly “burned”.
Martin Coult
London
It is somewhat rich of Jacob
Rees-Mogg to criticise civil
servants for not attending the
offi ce (Don’t force staff back into
offi ces, PM warned, 26 April) when
it was the Tory government who,
when I was a civil servant, cut back
on offi ce space and enforced “desk
sharing” so that one had to store
one’s papers etc in a mobile cabin
( which we used to call wheelie
bins ) and search, often wasting
time, for a free desk in the offi ce.
It was also the case that when
offi ces were full, many staff were
less productive due to having to
attend pointless meetings. Less
assiduous staff could get away
with appearing busy by walking
around looking important with a
sheaf of fi les, but never actually
doing anything with them, or
indulging in chitchat and extended
tea breaks , which I suppose
could be masked as Rees-Mogg’s
“collaborative working”.
Ian Arnott
Peterborough
- Jacob Rees-Mogg appears to
have two issues regarding civil
servants and hybrid working.
The fi rst is that civil servants
cannot possibly be (trusted to
be) productive if they are not at
their desks, and the second is
that empty desks in the centre
of London, where property costs
are high, equate to unacceptably
high costs for the taxpayer.
Does this mean that he will now
be leaving similar notes on the
near empty benches in the House
(Twitter has got the new owner it
deserves, 27 April). I would want
to add that letting your fi ngers run
ahead of your brain on any digital
platform should always be avoided.
Geoff Reid
Bradford- If Elon Musk was really keen
to use Tesla for a “radical green
energy transition”, he’d make his
cars cheaper, and the Tesla charging
points would be open to all e-car
owners, rather than just being
exclusive proprietary hardware.
Apart from that, he wouldn’t
emit so many tonnes of CO 2
shooting cars stupidly into space,
and he wouldn’t distract us all
from our common fate on Earth
with his fairytales (presumably
also proprietary) about the future
on Mars and beyond. If there’s to
be any kind of “radical transition”- I hope that the head of the civil
service, Simon Case, has explained
to Jacob Rees-Mogg that attendance
in the offi ce is no guarantee of
busyness. When a group of us were
moved into the Treasury as part of a
Whitehall reshuffl e under Margaret
Thatcher, we found it a very
sleepy organisation. We listened
credulously to a report that when
a civil servant had died at his desk,
the ambulance had come to take
away the wrong person.
Rob Hull
London - You report that the cabinet
secretary and “at least” four
government departments’
permanent secretaries have
“warned” the prime minister not
to force civil servants back into
the offi ce. It seems that these
people are happy to see their staff
continuing to draw their London
weighting allowances while
working from home, though the
multiple crises in the Passport
Offi ce , DVLA and numerous other
departments suggest that, if they
are in fact “working from home”,
they are not doing so with any
semblance of effi ciency.
Could I suggest that the fi rst
fi ve civil servants to be made an
example of to improve services are
these aforementioned secretaries ,
and that making them unemployed
would set the appropriate example?
After all, as they no longer have to
run offi ces fi lled by staff , they are
eff ectively all redundant.
Ian Mcnicholas
Waunlwyd, Blaenau Gwent - Please, for all our sakes,
would Jacob Rees-Mogg just
ignore his own advice and work
more from home?
Don Brown
Tregarth, Gwynedd
- I hope that the head of the civil
t’ to represent a northern glottal-
stopped defi nite article in front of
a consonant bears no resemblance
to the actual sound, irritates many
northerners and can be a source of
confusion to everyone else.
A good example is in the 1961 fi lm
Whistle Down the Wind, set in the
Ribble valley, when London-born
and Guildhall-trained actor Elsie
Wagstaff , knowing the t’ should not
be pronounced as written, omits the
glottal stop altogether and shouts
to Bernard Lee: “Are yer goin’ to
pub?” It’s a horrible false note in
an otherwise perfect fi lm.
Michael Pyke
Lichfi eld, Staff ordshire- The Yorkshire t’ can indeed be a
source of confusion. I remember
the time when I left my hotel in
Leeds to go out for a meal, asking
the receptionist in passing to
rectify a housekeeping oversight
and to ensure that towels were put
in my room. When I got back, it
was full of birds.
Jem Whiteley
Oxford
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letters-termsPlease, for all our sakes,
would Jacob Rees-Mogg
just ignore his own
advice and work
more from home?Don Brown