ONE of the reasons that Americans call a salary “compensation” is that you give up temporarily certain freedoms when you become an employee. In particular, publicly criticising your employer will almost certainly lead to a reprimand or even dismissal.
Mark Smith ("No wonder staff are refusing to work with JK Rowling", The Herald, June 18) is therefore right that those who oppose the actions of employees who don’t like some of JK Rowling’s views are hostile to pure freedom of speech. However, we recognise a slippery slope when we see one: how far would this go? Would we expect staff at a publishers to have to work on, say, an economics book with which they disagreed? Would it be okay for Mr Smith to write a column excoriating The Herald as second-rate newspaper? And would it make any difference if he kept writing such columns?
Andrew Anderson, Edinburgh EH5.
Banking farce
YOU tell us that the Bank of England intends to buy £100 billion of Treasury Bonds to support the UK economy ("Bank of England unveils £100bn stimulus to boost UK’S flailing economy", Herald Business, June 19). The last Bank of England statement of accounts state that the Bank has a positive balance in the region of £5 billion so the purchase of these bonds is being “financed by the issuance of central bank reserves”; that can be translated into humanspeak as meaning “money created out of thin air”. It's not our current economy that is a farce, but the whole financial system.
David J Crawford, Glasgow G12.
Another twist
THURSDAY'S (June 18) Word Wheel nine-letter answer was given as "tonsorial" the following day, which is obviously correct, but my answer was "torsional" which again is correct but not mentioned at all in your Word Wheel answers. Your compiler might like to know that another nine-word answer was available.
Kenneth Morin, Newton Mearns.
Whom with a view
BRAVO, David Gray. Your letter (June 19) with the withering observation about "people who earn a living from their facility with the written word" really chimed with me. My problem is with "whom": few of the aforementioned category of people appear to be aware of the existence of the word, far less its appropriate use. "By who? " Grrrr! Gets to me every time. Can't even blame it on the lockdown. I'm just a picky pedant.
Patricia Allison, Glasgow G46.
I HOPE David Gray has more success than I had in getting Herald writers to use the correct past participle of the verb "to lead". A typical breakfast table exchange in our house goes like this:
Me (enraged): "Has the word 'led' completely disappeared from the language? Don't they know the past tense of 'lead' is 'led'?"
Husband (fed up hearing me rant): "Write and tell them."
Actually I did write once and the very next day I was delighted to see the word "led" appear in an article. Alas, it's never happened again.
Nita Marr, Longniddry.
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