Brexit, coins – and the ‘missing’ Oxford comma

sir – As someone who has engraved hundreds of medals, including two for the Monnaie de Paris, I am surprised at the fuss over the “missing Oxford comma” on the Brexit 50p piece (Comment, January 28).

The inscription reads well and looks correct. An incursion would appear as an imperfection on the coin’s surface – and considering the utter dross that the Royal Mint has been issuing as coinage, it is rather splendid.

Alex Telford

Saint-jean-le-thomas, Normandy, France

sir – I am delighted that the Oxford comma, better styled the “Harvard comma”, is avoided on the new

50p piece.

It was only championed during our years inside the European Union and it is lazy grammar, a quick fix to poor sentence structure. We need to renew our values of clarity and, incidentally, ditch this perverse punctuation from the national curriculum.

Professor Tim Wilson

Rugby, Warwickshire sir – “Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations.”

Lofty ideals indeed – and entirely vacuous, after we have kicked 27 of them in the teeth.

Trevor Rigg

Edinburgh

sir – Leo Varadkar, the Irish Taoiseach, contends that with a population of 60 million, compared with 450 million in the rest of the EU, Britain must come to terms with the fact that it is now a small country (report, January 28). “Who do you think has the stronger team?” he asks.

He should be reminded that Team GB won 67 medals in the 2016 Summer Olympics. We were beaten only by the United States (population then

323 million) and China (1,379 million), and won over 50 per cent more medals than both Germany (82 million) and France (66 million). Ireland, with a population of five million, came away with a measly two silvers.

Peter Harper

Lover, Wiltshire