Q. My brother, who lives in southern France, uses unsavoury words to gain my attention, such as ‘infernal swine’, ‘schweinhund’ and ‘w****r’. Being somewhat genteel myself, I am reluctant to engage in verbal fisticuffs across the ocean. His literary aspirations, I believe, may have topped off with the Biggles compendium. What strategy, Mary, would you suggest I follow to maintain some fraternal friendship yet decrease the negative tone?
— Name withheld, Toronto
A. Tell him you have got new software on the computer which has an annoying habit of obliterating words it does not like. This makes his emails sometimes difficult to read. For example, he said that ‘x is a complete [something]’ but there was just a blank there, what did he mean to say? You guessed he might have meant ‘gentleman’?
Q. Each time I go to mass in my local church, the priest is monopolised afterwards by a man with tousled hair who doesn’t seem to realise that other parishioners are queuing behind him, all waiting for a word.
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