VINDICATION FOR MY FATHER.

VINDICATION FOR MY FATHER. As I recently posted here, I wrote a protest letter to the Times Literary Supplement in defense of Kingsley Amis and my father. I checked the January 29 TLS when it arrived, and the TLS has made a correction. Kingsley Amis had disputed with a journalist the meaning of the word “curmudgeon.” The journalist maintained that the word meant a “miser” or “skinflint”; Amis disagreed. The TLS had sided with the journalist. The January 29 TLS says that: “Correspondence with the subject sides with Amis.” (I imagine there were many protest letters.) It quotes an authority who says that if the journalist had used the NEW OXFORD DICTIONARY OF ENGLISH (1998), “she would have had to cede the palm to Amis, a straightforwardly ‘bad-tempered or surly person’” So Amis is vindicated as a straightforwardly bad-tempered or surly person. My father always smiled when he called himself a curmudgeon, but he was a generous man and never have joked about being a skinflint. This was my first letter to a newspaper, and I am pleased with how it turned out.