Dear Editor,
Thank you for Monday's article that St. Maarten now has a Nissan Leaf on its roads and giving this news front-page coverage, complete with photo. The Rosens are to be commended. You may be also interested to hear that, as with many things, Anguilla has beaten St. Maarten to it – the Masons have owned and driven a Leaf around Anguilla for a while now, even without front-page coverage in The Daily Herald.
Another instance of where "Anguilla has beaten St. Maarten" predates even most readers of the The Herald.
I am reliably informed that what is now called St. Maarten, used to be part of a much larger island called Anguillea or "Greater Anguilla" (whereas Anguilla appears never to have been called part of "Greater St. Maarten/Martin"). Publications of studies of a giant (bear-size) rodent (Amblyrhiza inundata) which lived round here refer to "Greater Anguilla" for example.
When referring to political groupings, the word you seem to be looking for is "factions", not "fractions". You manage to get this right when you are inserting copy from outside news wires, but in local coverage you inexplicably seem to prefer the word with an "r". To be clear on this, a fraction involves a numerator and a denominator, such as ⅗. Whereas, according to the Oxford Dictionary, a faction is a "small organized dissenting group within a larger one, especially in politics".
Finally, I seem to recall that in Mr. Snow's previous newspaper ("The Chronicle"?) there was a memorable weather report and I wonder if it could be repeated in The Daily Herald at some point. It went something like: "As the weatherman is off-island, there will be no weather today". (This was subsequently published in the now-defunct humorous Punch magazine in the UK.)
Keep up the good work!
Graham Crabtree
Greater Anguilla
