Metro reader shares how to stop the onslaught of ‘alpha’ toxicity among men

A reader responds to Yvette Cooper’s plan to fight young men’s radicalisation (Picture: Getty)

Have your say on these MetroTalk topics and more in the comments.

Some balance on Elon Musk

Elon Musk made comments on the riots that emerged after the Southport stabbings (Picture: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)

Robert Postings (MetroTalk, Fri) 
appears to be comparing Elon Musk’s ‘extreme’ comments on his Twitter/X platform with Facebook posts by Islamic State supporters.

Are the tech billionaire’s postings about his support for a legitimate candidate in a democratic election really comparable with the social media output of a vicious death cult?

I seem to recall that Donald Trump was the president of the US when Isis was finally defeated. He was also one of the few US presidents since World War II not to start a war.

I’m under no illusions of the man’s shortcomings but he’s really not a Facebook terrorist.

Maybe some of your readers need to reflect on whether they are, unwittingly, a source of unjustified prejudice – regardless of their past credentials. Kris, Coventry.

The campaign against noise pollution

Silence is quite rare nowadays (Credits: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Following on from Jean’s observations on music being played everywhere (MetroTalk, Fri), I challenge any business anywhere to come forward with a genuine complaint from someone that there was no background track in their premises.

Do any of all these businesses who do play musak stop to consider those that are hard of hearing or have other issues? Not to mention the effect on their staff of having to listen to piped music on a constant loop. And let’s also consider the detrimental effects all this unnecessary noise has on the animal world.

For those interested, there is an excellent organisation called Pipedown, which regularly campaigns for background music to be turned off.

Noise is known as the ‘forgotten pollutant’ for a good reason. Helen, Oxford

Regarding the old asylum system

I can empathise with much of what Alan Jensen (MetroTalk, Thu) says about the old ‘asylum’ type hospitals that were closed in the early 1990s as part of the ‘care in the community’ approach.

I myself worked as a qualified mental nurse for 40 years and trained in one such hospital in Hertfordshire.

Many patients were sadly not given the follow-up support required to manage outside of the safe hospital environment.

The old asylums were stigmatising in many ways, hence the move towards community care, but they also provided a ‘safe’ space for many.

We now have to find the right balance between funding good quality care in order to ensure patients are not ‘slipping through the net’ once discharged and that the public are kept safe.

Tragic events such as the Nottingham stabbings by Valdo Calocane – who was psychotic and suffered from delusions – remain rare. Statistically, people experiencing mental illness are far more likely to be the victim than the perpetrator of a serious crime. Lawrence Butterfield, Guisborough

The return to the till, the youth can’t count change and irritating endings

(Credits: Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Good to hear that Morrisons is cutting back on self checkouts. Store thefts are rising partly due to lack of staff to deter them. Self checkouts are a challenge to many who simply leave their purchases as there is no one there to assist.

So well done, Morrisons, and let’s hope other companies follow suit. AH, Leeds

Is it me or are younger people increasingly struggling to count cash?

Whenever I hand one of them a carefully counted out bunch of coins they start off by staring at it in disbelief before cradling it like I’ve just handed them the crown jewels and they daren’t drop it.

And they finish off by picking at it in a disturbed manner as if it’s going to burn their hand or turn to dust before throwing it dismissively in to the till and pulling a face as if to say, ‘Nah, that was all just a bad dream.’ Dec, Essex

One of the most annoying features on social media is people who, having given an opinion on something, finish it with the words, ‘End of’.

This tends to suggest not only that they have settled the argument once and for all but also that theirs is the only opinion that matters.

Thankfully, this sort of nonsense hasn’t spread to MetroTalk just yet. Michael, Chingford

Your ‘escape goats’ put me in mind of murdered Mondegreen

I found your article on the most common misheard sayings – ‘escape’ instead of ‘scape’ goat , for example – very entertaining (Metro, Fri).
A malaprop – as you call them – is, of course, taken from Mrs Malaprop, a lady given to the use of words in this manner in the Richard Sheridan play The Rivals. The term ‘mondegreen’ is another expression that, I think, better illustrates this misuse of words.

The US writer Sylvia Wright coined the word when she was recalling her mother reading to her when a young girl, a Scottish ballad called The Bonnie Earl O’ Moray. In this ballad, there occur the lines: ‘Ye Highlands and Lowlands, Oh, whaur hae ye been? They have slain the Earl o’ Moray and laid him on the green.’

In the romantically-inclined mind of the young Sylvia, this was a sad story of the dashingly handsome Earl of Moray being murdered (probably in a Scottish inter-clan feud) and his beautiful true love, Lady Mondegreen being butchered by his side.

Accordingly, she heard the last two lines as: ‘They have slain the Earl of Moray And Lady Mondegreen.’ As Wright mentioned in her essay when coining the expression, mondegreens are always better than the original. Alan, Walthamstow