I was incredibly disappointed to come across antiquated and irrelevant reporting in your story ‘Hundreds of new sayings recorded for posterity in Oxford Dictionary of Quotations’ on September 17.

I am at a loss why you needed to write: The editor, who is single and has no children, has dedicated most of her working life to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is antiquated sexist reporting. You never see such information reported for men.

In today’s diverse society, it should be totally unimportant if people are married or have children.

Today’s letters

We rightly no longer fixate on people’s ethnicity or sexual orientation. But nor should we dwell on their marital status and numbers of children produced, whether it be zero or more. Worse still is the disparaging implication carried in your mention of Elizabeth Knowles’s status as seeming to be lacking somehow. It is irrelevant both to her work and to us as readers. People can commit themselves fully to their work, whether or not they are young, old, married or unmarried.

I sincerely hope that you don’t report any more such irrelevant details for women in your paper, unless that is, you do the same for all the men.

Either way, I expect your readers are, like me, only interested in the real stories, not these irrelevant unrelated additions.

Sarah Dudgeon

Caps Lane,

Cholsey

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