Being an Australian resident now, but still a Maltese at heart, I have read a number of articles by Daphne Caruana Galizia. However, I choose to express my disapproval of her and her article entitled “The One-Word Warriors” (TMIS, 31 October). Perhaps this worthwhile publication should remember Richard Holt Hutton’s 1861 comment: “Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men (sic) too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”

Far from acquiescing, I am surprised at best by the author’s failure to debate constructively, and offended at worst by such a childish and self-serving polemic. The world has produced some influential critiques of societies and governments upon which would-be writers can model their work. Two of Mrs Caruana Galizia’s own sex, Nikki Giovanni and Ellen Langer might be fitting examples, or men such as Thoreau or Bergson, who, when critical, are constructive. Such reading would perhaps also teach Mrs Caruana Galizia to distinguish between the terms “intellect” and “socio-economic status”. The latter is mostly used by writers who categorise societies’ members as such so as to advocate for them. They use “socio-economic” according to the obvious definition to study the social and economic factors that determine human chances in life. Furthermore, instead of oblique references to Sicilian emotions or etymological influence, Mrs Caruana Galizia might learn from the real sociology of John Galtung’s 1971 book, Members of Two Worlds, about three villages in western Sicily. The point is that he uses the adjective “socio-economic” for the right reasons: to clarify societal development as society’s increasing capacity to “liberate itself” from nature, namely, how humans find themselves in the world.

Most offensive about Mrs Caruana Galizia’s article is her divisiveness, constructed linguistically through the overuse of the lemma pronoun, “they” and its word forms “them” and “their”, in fact, 32 times throughout, although not always expressed with clear antecedents and therefore easy reading. This use is common among gossipmongers working in what Ellen Wheeler Wilcox described in 1967 as “The wretched house of They”. Before that, Rudyard Kipling’s 1926 poem We and They made play with such deliberate discrimination:

“All good people agree,

“And all good people say

“And all good people, like Us, are We,

“And everyone else is They:

“But if you cross the sea,

“Instead of over the way,

“You may end by (think of it!) looking on We

“As only a sort of They.”

His childlike (not childish) language, I would think, is chosen for those who posit themselves to be “good people” while separating themselves from those who they regard as not. Such division is juvenile in its self-indulgence. But would a “good” person, who claims to love Malta, exclude a high percentage of those because they are not of her class and therefore not “good”.

So let’s be honest and put Mrs Caruana Galizia’s arrogant and divisive article, as this is what it really means, in just two sentences; that’s all it needs: All the people of my class are good because we intelligently support the Nationalist Party while the low-class buffoons who champion the Labour Party need to know their place and remain where “they” belong. I would prefer to read this instead of being taken through her vindictive offering that reads like a bad novel.

Raphael Dingli

WATSON, AUSTRALIA