Peter Binose
Thursday, May 07, 2015

Dear Sir

Whilst talking with an old friend in Dublin recently we were discussing Prime Minister Gonsalves.

For this letter I will describe my friend as Paddy, that’s not his name, nothing like his name, but will hide his persona from any collective spite that may just be gathered against him after this little tête-à-tête.

He follows both the printed news and the online news very carefully regarding Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. As a child his parents were posted in SVG and he has holidayed there a thousand times since becoming a man. He loves our little country and has fond memories of us as a people and our verdant island and the beauty of the white sanded Grenadine pearl necklace of islands.

The discussion that started with old times eventually got around to what is happening today. He is so disappointed in what he reads about the political situation under the leadership of Dr Gonsalves and his Unity Labour Party.

Paddy is not a Guinness drinker, but he does like a very nice glass of fine Port after dinner at his lovely old house, where we chatted after we had the most delightful dinner. He has worked all over the world and we first met in Moscow whilst both heading up different American companies there.

With our several refills of Port we smoked a King Edward American cigar each. Paddy had introduced me to them in Moscow, it was one of the duty free benefits that he brought in whenever he came from New York. Old habits die hard as they say.

I forgot to tell you about the Vintage Port, it was a very nice bottle of 1960 Taylors Vintage. It was like drinking pure velvet.

But enough of that, our chat got around as I said to discussing Dr. Gonsalves. He called him a mendacious man. Having forgot what the word meant I continued to chat into the early hours of a Saturday morning. But when I got up the next day and was checking my emails and other online activities, I looked up mendacious. Below is what I found, I am not sure if all those synonyms are what Paddy meant to apply to the comrade, I recognize a few that I would apply but ‘all of them’ not too sure about that, and in any case I am sure Gonsalves would want to sue me if I tried to apply them all. So we will leave it at that, because I never told Paddy that I had looked the word up, therefore never asked him to better explain exactly in what context he was applying it.

MENDACIOUS
artful, clever in deception, collusive, concocted, counterfeit, covinous, cunning, deceitful, deceiving, devoid of truth, dishonest, distorted, embroidered, fabricated, false, falsified, feigned, fictitious, fraudulent, given to lying, incorrect, insincere, invented, lacking truth, lying,
made up, make believe, mendax [mendāx], misrepresentative, misstated,
not straightforward, perfidious, perjured, perverted, pretended, prevaricating, sham, sly, spurious, truthless, uncandid, ungenuine, untrue, untruthful, unveridical, varnished, void of truth, wrong.

Paddy’s command of the English language, like most educated Dubliners is just amazing, eating a wonderful fresh lemon sole for dinner, drinking the lovely Port, smoking a nice semi green leafed sweet cigar, and listening to the cultured brogue of Irish excellence, made a most wonderful evening to remember.

For those of you who like looking at dictionaries, take a look on line. Take each of the listed synonyms and look up the synonyms to each of those synonyms, you will be left in amazement.

Peter Binose
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