AN UPSTART WORD.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 507, 11 March 1949, Page 20

AN UPSTART WORD.

Sir,-In a review in The Listener of Sartre’s Portrait of the Anti-Semite the following appears: "An underprivileged class diminishes the privileges of all." This meaningless phrase is alas repeated under a photograph of M. Sartre.* | A privileged class is one having advantages not possessed by the ordinary citizen. ‘An underprivileged class can therefore mean only a class which does not possess enough advantages over its neighbours! To condemn privilege and then to use a word implying that there is not enough of it shows a shocking lack of thought. Reply may be made that the meaning of the quotation is clear enough and that only a pedant would boggle at the way the meaning is expressed. One guesses that the intended meaning is that existence of a depressed class within a community diminishes something or other for all of that community. "All" cannot possibly have privileges, so that the privileges of all cannot be diminished. Words are the tools of thought. Underprivileged is a word which contains within itself such contradictions that it should never be used by anyone who values clear thinking. Is it too much to ask, Sir, that this meaningless upstart word "underprivileged" should take its place amongst those depraved (underprivileged) words which are banned from wour nerindical?

JOHN R.

JENNINGS

(Wellington).

(Our correspondent will find our answer in the first sentence of his ewn third paragraph. ids}