Denis Warner is not only a friend, but a man who has been something of a role model for this aspiring reporter, as acknowledged on page 217.

Tim Bowden, Sydney, NSW

The non-rich PhD

Dear Editor,

Although I lack a PhD in psychology, may I be permitted to suggest that Gideon Haigh’s preoccupation with PhDs is bordering on the unhealthy? His review of Mark Westfield’s book on the HIH collapse (ABR, May 2003) contains, on my count, his third ‘shot’ in the last few issues of ABR at what a dear and now departed friend of mine, an Army Colonel who ‘did one’ in his retirement, used to call ‘Doctor (Non-rich Variety)’.

To be fair to Gideon, his previous complaints have been about the inability of people with PhDs to write, whereas this time he’s merely suggesting that they’re crooks. But I do wonder why Gideon thinks that someone with a PhD in economics is guilty of ‘pretence’ in calling himself ‘Doctor’?

For the sake of ABR readers, I hope that Gideon is never asked to review a book on the history of Nazism, because I’m certain he could not overlook that ‘Herr Doctor’ wrote a PhD thesis on romantic drama and liked to be called ‘Dr Goebbels’.

(Dr?) Frank Bongiorno, Armidale, NSW

Clive James and genocide

Dear Editor,

What purpose (or whose purpose) does Clive James think he is serving in culturing the complaint about genocide entering the vocabulary of Australian history? A review of Best Australian Essays 2002 (‘A Big Boutique’, ABR, May 2003) is seized as an occasion to trail, one way and then back again, the battered but still bloody red herring of Turks massacring Armenians in order to slap it over John Pilger and presumably all the rest of us who have seen Australian relevance in the concept of genocide. The catastrophe brought to Aboriginal peoples by European acquisition of the continent was arguably genocidal and certainly a matter for consideration rather more considered than Keith Windschuttle has offered. To promote Windschuttle in this context is either ingenuous or disingenuous; the references to genocide in his book are clearly for polemical purpose only. James knows about propaganda, and about demagogy. He must be aware of the political context in which Windschuttle is finding fans; perhaps they are fans he would like to have, too.

The Best Australian Essays project – like ABR in recent times – has done much to focus public interest on issues at the heart of Australia’s history. The most serious issue of Australian history deserves Clive James’s better judgment.

Tony Barta, Kew, Vic.

Paying attention

Dear Editor,

Clive James didn’t pay much attention in his school grammar lessons if his review in the May issue is to be believed. He seems to think that he was taught to ‘parse a sentence’. Very unlikely, unless he had a sadistic teacher who kept him in for inattention and told him to ‘parse every word in this sentence’. What ‘the old Australian school system’ taught was actually ‘parsing and analysis’. You started with the still-useful exercise of analysing a sentence into its constituent clauses. Even the delicate task of deciding whether an adverbial clause was one of reason, purpose or intention had some (non-grammatical) merit of teaching fine distinctions in meaning. After analysis, one delved into the more controversial and apparently contradictory process of ‘parsing’ some of the words. The theory behind parsing was absurd, with confused definitions of the ‘parts of speech’, e.g. ‘A noun is the name of a person, place, or thing’. Mercifully, in practice students learned to parse (if they did) by following, in an apprentice-like fashion, the teacher’s own procedure, which was to identify the finite verbs and then identify the other ‘parts of speech’ by their relationship to the verbs. A student who failed to grasp the difference between parsing and analysis was a rarity. Some teachers even required a different set of ruled tables for the two processes.

Come to think of it, ‘paying attention’, though beloved of teachers, was a strange phrase, chiefly because it suggested that attention was a marketable commodity, where the cost was borne by the students. I wonder often what the teachers buy one half so worthless as the goods they sell may have sprung into some students’ minds.

Grammar can be an exciting adventure into the curiosities of language. With two recently published comprehensive grammars of English available, one hopes that one or other is on the shelves of any teacher tackling the subject.

Ken Goodwin, Indooroopilly, Qld