Madam, The day Derval O’Rourke won a silver medal in the 100-metre hurdles, I had to run to my dictionary to read Niall Kiely’s column (Sports, July 31st). Mr Kiely deserves a gold medal – for verbosity.
“Flummery”, “litotes”, “rebarbative”, “meerkat” and “etiolated” proved to be formidable hurdles for this slow reader who just about cleared “epiphanies”, “equivocation”, “euphemisms”, “symbiosis” and “valedictory”; and all these hurdles in one short, 500-word article about the people’s champion, Alex Hurricane Higgins.
What the late Alex might have said about the piece I can only imagine, a few choice F-words, no doubt, but hardly ‘flummery’. – Yours, etc,