When Epistolary Duty’s To Be Done, To Be Done, A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One

The Misdelivered Letters, Litotes, The Tear-Stained Charade:

 

From the BBC story about the Muslim families of the three little maids from school, pretending for the British poublic they had “no idea” what might have led their dutiful, and very Muslim daughters, from going off to Syria, and instead playing the victim and demanding an apology from the Police Commissioner because, even though the families at the Bethnal Green School had indeed received a prior warning, the letters sent to the parents were entrusted to the students to deliver, and the three little maids did not deliver theirs. Why, it’s practically Tess of the d’Urbervilles. You can find more on this Muslim-staged charade, with a Muslim politician running the show, and a Muslim lawyer presenting the fake aggrievements of the very Muslim, very devout families (look at the dress of the Begum sister) at the BBC.

In the next edition of some Handbook of Figures of Speech (think George Puttenham, think Sister Miriam Joseph, think Professor Quinn) I hope Cameron’s remark will appear as an example of “litotes” or, in the alternative, it could appear among the watch-out-for-this monitory examples in a new edition of Fowler and Fowler’s “The King’s English”:

“Mr Cameron said “everyone has a role to play” in stopping Britons joining IS, including politicians, parents, communities and schools.

“When you have got educated [!] British[!] schoolgirls at an outstanding school[!} in Greenwich finding it somehow attractive to get on a plane to travel to Syria to go and live in a country where gay people are being thrown off buildings[note the very first thing that comes to his mind] and British citizens are being beheaded [“British” only?]and appalling brutality [is there brutality that does not appall?]is being meted out [do you “mete out…brutality”?], we have a problem,” he said.