When it comes to getting irked, it’s better to be a William Cobbett than a Rod Liddle, says Tom Hodgkinson

I hope you’re all enjoying the current issue of the Idler magazine. It’s always a pleasure to read your letters, particularly if they are angry or attack sentiments expressed in the magazine. We’ve had quite a few funny ones about Stephen Bayley’s excellent “Why I Hate Fun” piece, and possibly our most popular subject for your rage and fury is our column, “Too Annoying for Words”. This is where we ask you to nominate irritating phrases and expressions, and it’s proving to be extremely popular.

It seems that a lot of us spend a lot of time being annoyed. We enjoy it.

This pleasure in getting peeved was not recommended by the Stoic philosophers. They reckoned that you should treat annoyances with great equanimity and this attitude is summed up by a little comedy routine I saw once. The comic came on stage wearing a toga and declared himself to be a Stoic stand-up. And his first joke went like this: “You know what really annoys me?” he asked the audience. “Nothing!”

Sometimes the word is used completely witlessly, as when commentators of the Rod Liddle variety describe someone with whom they disagree (eg Greta Thunberg) as “annoying”, which is an amazingly unsophisticated and childish sort of insult. I find that really annoying.

The point about annoyance, though, is that sometimes your annoyance is justified, and you then, sometimes, do something about it, something positive. It used to annoy me that teenagers studying English A Level were unable to put the apostrophe in the right place. So I helped to launch the Bad Grammar Award which attempted to teach people the rudiments of good punctuation.

The Sex Pistols found the society of the 1970s extremely annoying and their annoyance resulted in one of the best LPs ever made. William Cobbett was superb at being annoyed (he was a “good hater”) and one of his annoyances – that people of the early 19th century had forgotten how to bake bread – led to him producing an excellent guide to self sufficiency called Cottage Economy.

Cobbett was also very, very annoyed by the insults and hatred directed towards the Luddite protestors, who he saw as being justified in their annoyance at the new machinery:

The abuse which has been heaped upon you by those base writers whose object is to inflame one part of the people against the other; the horrid stories which have been retailed about your injustice and cruelty; the murderous punishments which these writers express their wish to see inflicted on you; the delight which they evidently feel when any of you come to an untimely end; all these produce no feeling in my mind other than that of abhorrence of your calumniators.

So please – if there is anything that annoys you in our current issue, do tell me about it.

SELECTED COMMENTS

These comments were mailed to us after an earlier version of this piece was sent out as a newsletter. We like to publish a selection and reserve the right to edit them for clarity. Feel free to drop us a line with your thoughts.

Sir: Enjoyed your letter, but one thing about it annoyed me… How could someone who “helped to launch the Bad Grammar Award” write: “Cobbett was also very very annoyed by the insults and hatred directed towards the Luddite protestors, who he saw as being justified in their annoyance at the new machinery”. When any alumnus of Westminster worth his salt would know that it should be “whom he saw as being justified”! Yes, yes, I’m well aware that “whom” is rapidly disappearing from 21st-century English in the same way that “as if” is being replaced by “like” – now the most overused word in common parlance. Some of us proof-reading pedants still feel the need to make a stand though…
Paul Blezard

Sir: I’ve just come across the word “suicidality”. How annoying is that? It could easily put you off your dinner.
Ray Martin

Sir: I find it impossible to be annoyed by you, so I won’t say this is annoying – let’s go with mildly irritated. You put “P.S.” at the end of emails, which isn’t necessary. When it was the quill and paper, there would have been a signature hence the need to state the stuff below the signature was postscript. No requirement when we can just go back and respace the paragraphs in emails.
Jason Brown

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