Words we should staff the barricades against | Brief letters

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As someone working in human resources who has spent years encouraging colleagues to use the word “staffing” rather than “manning”, I find it ironic that in reviewing the TV series Furious, which is “powered [by] female rage” (27 July), Lucy Mangan wrote that its lead character Alice Black “is manning the FBI tip line”.
Kathy Ashton
York

• Mark Lawson states that Jimmy Cricket’s “retained native accent allowed him to rhyme ‘faffing’ with ‘laughing’” (No smut, no swearing, wrong-feet wellies and a silly hat: the gentle comedy world of Jimmy Cricket, 4 August). As most of the UK’s English speakers would say, these words do rhyme. It is only some from southern England and a few other areas who pronounce laughing incorrectly.
Gordon Glassford
Corby, Northamptonshire

• As Kemi Badenoch still supports Joshua Bonehill-Paine because he has been deradicalised (Kemi Badenoch gives former neo-Nazi advisory role after he withdraws as Tory candidate, 5 August), perhaps she’ll now campaign to allow Shamima Begum to return to the UK.
Mary Hutty
Bath

• “Vertical drinking” is not the problem (Council wants pubs in London’s Soho and West End to ban standing, 6 August). It is the inability to remain vertical while drinking that is where the trouble begins.
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire

• I will only accept a safety driver in a self-driving taxi if it is Ann Droid (Leicester Square, please guv’: Self-driving taxis cleared for London streets ‘later this summer’, 5 August).
Margaret Squires
St Andrews, Fife

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