Reverential letters to the editor?
As regular CHN readers will know, my failure at getting letters into the newspapers is exceeded only by my spectacular lack of success. Nonetheless, enough have slipped by the letter editor's eagle eye to annoy some of the other correspondents, one of whom asked why another writer, Nigel Fortescue, and I would occasionally sign ourselves as “Reverend”, and other times not. The letters editor was off her game and allowed this reply to slip through:
Dear editor,
Noel McGuire (SMH Letters, November 30), I cannot speak for the Reverend Nige (“I would as soon defend a lion”, to quote Charles Spurgeon on the Bible). But putting “Rev” in my signature is a handy way of showing that I am speaking as a Christian (and occasionally, as a Sydney Anglican) while slipping out from under the letter editor's brutal word count: just one word to communicate a whole universe of ideas. It also helps on those rare occasions when I want to convey that slightly olde worlde sense of religious pomposity, such as right now.
Reverend Gordon Cheng Kingsford