Notes & Asides - Letter to the Editor

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: In his letter to you (Sept. 30), Rob Lisch writes that he "has read that a single letter combined with another word to form one object (e.g., T-shirt) should always be capitalized."

In your reply you compliment Mr. Lisch on using parentheses, which, as you put it, "appear to be on the way out."

But Mr. Lisch should be chastised, not complimented. One uses a comma before and after "e.g.," not parentheses. Adding parentheses makes for a redundancy, e.g., a superfluity that is quite incorrect.

Sincerely yours,

Tom Wendel

Campbell, Calif.

--Dear Mr. Wendel: But you are confusing "e.g. (T-shirt)," which would be wrong, even dastardly, and ". . . (e.g., T-shirt)," wherein the example is expressly segregated as -- parenthetical!

Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Re your exchange with Earl L. Brown (Sept. 16):

Since Jesus spoke no English, He did not use the phrase "fishers of men." Those words were put into His mouth by some subsequent translator.

It's not the same thing.

Best wishes,

W. Barnes Hunt

Brookhaven, N.Y.

--Dear Mr. Buckley: I didn't know that Christ spoke English!

Regards,

Sidney Zecher

Newburgh, N.Y.

--Dear Messrs. Hunt, Zecher, and a dozen other correspondents who were kind enough to make the same point -- you are of course correct. The King James scholars might have taken a liberty with the word, but surely not with the sentiment.

Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: The curse of conservatism is that our moral absolutism dooms us to welter in torment at mere peccadilloes, such as the misspelled "tendonitis" in the Aug. 12 letter of James C. Neely, M.D.

My patellar reflex is to assume that an M.D. should know that the correct spelling is "tendinitis," but then one begins the vicious infinite regress through department editors, copy editors, proofreaders, and typesetting computers, and the mystery deepens.

Is it revisionism (i.e., another concession to liberals, who want to eradicate the twin threats of merit and responsibility) or is it a mistake? The latter I can forgive. The former means war.

Sincerely,

Julian Schmidt

Treynor, Iowa

--Dear Mr. Schmidt: You are confusing, if only because tendonitis and tendinitis are both okayed by the American Heritage Dictionary. Or did you have another point? Advise.

Cordially, WFB

-- Dear Mr. Buckley: Re your comments on minimalizing in the cyberworld:

A certain email vernacular has evolved on the internet. Capitals r passe and shorthand is de rigueur. Email is frequent but concise and u can c the appeal of abbreviations. 2 b honest, none of this is novel. Telegraphers did the same thing 150 years ago.

Sincerely,

Bill Freda

Valley Stream, N.Y.

--Dear Mr. Freda: On the matter of capital letters, I shrink from the e. e. cummings approach, but continue to resent the manual effort required to capitalize.

A few years ago, I made a modest proposal in print, to wit, a keyboard should be devised which, upon pressing with extra pressure on any key, causes a letter to be capitalized. I offered 90 percent of any royalties realized on the production of such a time-saver to whoever manufactured it, but nobody has. Would you like to try? It is all yours. Think of it! "The Freda Keyboard Cuts Keyboard Effort in Half!," William F. Buckley Jr. commented.

Cordially,

-- WFB