Letters roundup: 11 November 2022

Crass stereotyping by Sir Geoffrey

I write with regard to the speech by Sir Geoffrey Vos to the Legal Services Board on 13 October entitled ‘The legal profession: its three most pressing issues for 2022’.

Under the subheading of ‘Are women and those from diverse backgrounds made comfortable and included in the legal workplace?’, Sir Geoffrey said: ‘If the conversation is exclusively about Oxford, cricket and the latest operatic production at Covent Garden, it will exclude judges from backgrounds where none of those things is of interest.’

This comment is patronising and amounts to crass stereotyping of women and people of colour. It implies that women and people of colour are less capable of attending Oxford University than a white man. Speaking as a person of colour who went to Oxford, I find this insulting.

Many of the world’s greatest cricketers are, and have been, people of colour, such as Michael Holding, Sachin Tendulkar, Roland Butcher and Virat Kohli, to name just a few. The excellence of the women’s international teams and female cricketers such as Mithali Raj and Rachael Heyhoe Flint bears witness to women’s interest in cricket.

People of colour and women are just as likely to be interested in opera as white men. Some of the world’s greatest opera singers have been, or are, women or people of colour, such as Paul Robeson, Jessye Norman, Willard White and J’Nai Bridges, again to name just a few.

It is most disappointing that a senior judge, the master of the rolls no less, should have expressed such a ludicrous view in 21st-century England.

Ashok Ghosh

Solicitor and partner, Excello Law, London WC2

Let language live

I disagree with Mother in Law about ditching Latin (Gazette, 28 October). I learnt Latin up to scholarship level and enjoyed it. We began with French in our first year, then Latin in the second. It was a brain teaser to get one’s head round declensions of nouns and conjugations of verbs, but one did. When I began German for GCE, I was used to how these foreign languages could behave and the anatomy of a language. I progressed to Italian evening classes after graduating in law; it was a doddle after Latin. My husband was a railway enthusiast so I needed to attempt Dutch, being abandoned on railway platforms while he took endless photos of trains.

Latin has enormously improved my ability with written English and general language skills. It helps understand English insofar as words derive from Latin. It helps communication with clients who have less education, for one can avoid the Latin-based words and use equivalents based on Anglo-Saxon or Old English.

I am now retired and live in Lincolnshire, where Polish, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, Romanian are among the languages spoken on the street, in notices at the local doctors, hospital and so on. So I am having a go at Russian and Polish. If you can get your head round Latin when young, your brain is better able to tackle more languages later and life is more enjoyable. The future now for school children is Spanish and Mandarin. And what about Welsh? Life can be so rewarding, when one has better language skills. The English are criticised for lack of inclination to learn foreign languages so I feel obliged to censor Mother in Law and urge her to keep Latin on the life support machine.

Myrtle Walter

Retired solicitor, Lincoln

Death of Latin is greatly exaggerated

Actually, Latin is not nearly as dead as Mother in Law seems to believe. It lives on not only in the useful shorthand legal phrases which she so despises, but in many other disciplines as well: in astronomy for example the names of the constellations are in Latin and decline into the Latin genitive case when a particular star is referred to. In music, Latin is widespread in the numerous settings of the Latin mass made by most of the great composers of the past five centuries, as well as shorter pieces such as Mozart’s Ave verum corpus and the ever popular Panis Angelicus by Cesar Franck. And then there are biologists and zoologists who use Latin for the taxonomy of the various species they describe or discover.

Mother in Law is clearly intelligent and articulate. If she finds herself bewildered by short and simple Latin phrases she is clearly not the one to blame. She was badly let down by an educational system which failed and betrayed her even though she may not have realised it – after all, you don’t miss what you never had. If she can be criticised at all, however, it is perhaps for the attitude of ‘anything I don’t understand has no right to exist and should be wiped out’. That I fear is the road to ruin.

Peter F Bolwell

Hastings

Jaw-dropping tech

I read with a mixture of nostalgia and sadness Michael Cross’s obituary to the beloved fax machine. My own fax machine still stands proudly on the corner of a worktop, nourished with its own private BT telephone line, forlornly awaiting the increasingly remote possibility of a connection with the outside world.

This reminded me of an even more obscure piece of cutting-edge technology from the late 1980s which found its way into my new fledgling practice in rural Leicestershire: BTIS, or British Telecom Information Service. This was the forerunner of emails and easily predated the world wide web. The idea was that with an IBM computer sporting a massive 250mb disk and a black-and-white monitor, it was possible to type a message on the screen and transmit it down the connected telephone line to another similarly endowed computer. This jaw-dropping technology was intended to sound the death knell of the fax machine and revolutionise the entire legal profession overnight.

Like my fax machine, I waited forlornly for the possibility of a connection with another BTIS endowed computer. It did not happen!

It is now 35 years later and I still wonder if I was the only person on the planet who embraced this technology or whether it was just a figment of my imagination?

Trevor F Moore

Notary public and solicitor, Ibstock, Leicestershire