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The American Association of Lexicographers & Grammarians (if there is such a body) ought to have you birds indicted for counterfeiting of and assault and battery on the English language. There never was and probably never will be such a mass of verbal contortions and hodgepodge within two covers as appear weekly in your dizzy rag. I only read it once in awhile for fun. If I read it completely every week, I'd soon be as dizzy as you are. . . .
T. E. SPEAR New York City
Dizzily
Sirs:
TIME has erred again in reporting the death of James Joyce (Jan. 20). Who but Joyce could have written your article entitled "Up the Roller Coaster" with its "patient, powerless, hopeful meaninglessness" and its "humping dizzily up that first clanking climb"?
GUY E. NOYES New Haven, Conn.
> The great James Joyce has undeniably passed on (see p. 72) and there is no Ouija board in TIME'S editorial offices.—ED.
Garner's Furniture
Sirs:
TIME, Jan. 20: Isn't Mr. Garner's furniture good enough for Man-of-the-Earth Wallace? But then—what's a few dollars for furniture in a "budget" of 17½billions?
D. D. COOPER White Sulphur Springs, Mont.
> To TIME'S research department a sharp rap on the knuckles for not detecting that the picture showing outgoing Vice President Garner telephoning from a lonely chair in an otherwise empty office was a photographer's hoax —merely taken in the outer reception room, from which a desk had been removed for refinishing. Actually Mr. Garner removed no Vice-Presidential furniture; the same that served him will serve incoming Vice President Wallace.—ED.
Opposite Effect
Sirs:
In TIME, Dec. 23, you print, one after the other, speeches by Hitler and Lord Lothian. Your presentation of these speeches leads me to feel that the comments on it that come immediately to my finger tips may be of some interest.
It would be of great value to the intensifying of our spiritual and intellectual relations with Latin America if the thoughtful public could appreciate the essential difference in our mentalidades, could realize, for example, that these two speeches, printed side by side, in Spanish translation, would have precisely the opposite effect down here from that they produce on 90% of the U. S. readers of TIME. They would be first-rate totalitarian propaganda. This does not mean that Latin Americans, in general or individually, are stupid.
Nor does it mean that they are particularly vulnerable to meaningless vehemence and invective. . . . The Latin American cannot be expected to react exactly as we do because he lacks 1) firsthand experience of the sustained and healthy functioning of democracy, 2) the fundamental mistrust of Hitler's word, fed in North Americans by the feeling of intimacy with the tragedies of Czecho-Slovakia, Poland, etc., given us by our press, our great magazines, our radio, which after all have no true counterpart even in the wealthiest metropolitan centres [in South America], and 3) sentiment or love of any kind for the British Empire. . . .
ALBERT B. FRANKLIN Quito, Ecuador
Back to Birmingham
Sirs: