posted Sep 29, 2008

Moby, that last comment seems a little sexist - there are female doctors, bankers, mathmeticians, etc.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

Quite a few of the Academies do still have lessons in the morning, say, and training in the afternoons (with tournaments at the weekends and in the holidays).

However, as someone who works in sport I can assure you that no girl would make it to the highest level in tennis (top 20 say) if they stayed in full-time education until they were 16. No chance.

They just wouldn’t have built up sufficient top-level match experience to compete.

Of course, this is in itself a problem – how many comfortably off, professional parents would take such a risk with their child’s future as to remove them from full-time education and concentrate on sport? I know I wouldn’t

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posted Sep 29, 2008

Dear 3671276,

May I call you 367?

I think it might seem more than a LITTE sexist!

By the way, there are not so may female bankers. If there were then the banking system would not be in such disarray since all the bankers would have been at home making jam and babies rather than at their office giving out high risk loans to anyone wearing the right school tie.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

Moby, so basically, we are agreed the comment was sexist but facetious, as was your response. Little bit of a generalisation on the bankers though.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

367,

I think you may have mistyped something in your last post, which makes it slightly less than 100% clear what you're getting at. Nevertheless..

I didn't really mean what I said in my post; and so the term, facetious, is probably a good one - although this only partially mitigates the sexism. However, it's all done in the spirit of engendering debate, such as this.

It probably does, however, also does reveal a certain frustration with the BBC programming efforts and the systematic dumbing down of the population - particularly the younger viewers.

The opening to my response (Dear 3671276, May I call you 367?) is a paraphrasing of a letter from Noel Coward to Lawrance of Arabia and is intended to encourage you to add a few letters to your name as an aide memoire. Apologies if you have put a great deal of thought and consideration into this alias.

Of course, I do understand that the bankers thing is a sweeping generalisation, but there is, I think many will agree, a seed of truth there.

P.S. Did you know that 'facetious' is one of only two words in the English dictionary that has all five vowels AND in the correct order. If you like these sorts of games you have 30 minutes from this post to find the second.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

I am searching abstemiously for the answer to your riddle, meanwhile one could argue that alphabet meets the criteria.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

Well done, 367. You needed nothing like 30 minutes.

How about a word that ends with the three letters, "amt"? You have 10 minutes.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

I always wonder who dreamt up these riddles in the first place and, indeed, who verifies them.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

In the nick of time. Presumably you had a little time to spare, which you used to put together a meaningful sentence.

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posted Sep 29, 2008

You presume correctly but we stray from the point. The standard theory around why Brazil produces so many outstanding footballers is national obsession * poverty. One could try to make a similar case for women's tennis in Russia but British dominance in the near future seems unlikely - hope she pushes on into the top 100 over the next 12 months or so - that would be a great achievement for first year.

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