Letter: Small, curly and completely redundant

Arguments of the type put forward in your article are about status rather than ease of communication. They reflect the feelings experienced by scribes when universal education showed that even the mentally retarded could learn to read and write; and the scandalised blusterings of older academics recently, when their exclusive credentials were threatened by the massed ranks of the unwashed passing A-levels.

A Japanese scientist trying to write up his latest discoveries in biology, or a Malaysian sales rep writing a report to head office in Taiwan, can have little interest in this sort of exotica.

Wilfred Gaunt

Leicester