phobic

Sir—Now and again some little racist plucks up courage, takes posion pen in hand, and treats us to the sort of bilge that Salient printed last week from a Mr. P. J. Kelly. Salient may be acting in the interests of a free press when it prints the rantings of the lunatic fringe, but have the editors considered the distortion of our liberal image that could result if the wryly understated editorial heading "No Comment" were simply taken-up the wrong way by whoever reads Salient in, say, Russia?

No doubt Mr Kelly would hardly be worried, since the Russians—like for that matter most of the world's population—are also given to perpetual chattering in a language that "in no way resembles English".

As a forcigner, who moreover has been known to "chatter" in his own language in (gasp!) public, I can't quite sympathise with Mr Kelly's linguistic fears—did he perhaps have trouble with his reading Knowledge.

As for his racial phobias, I would suggest a psycbiatrist, or perhaps more cheaply:"Go West young man!—you won't have to share tableswith them at the South African universities.