Excellent. I’d imagine that yet again the fact that you’re a woman with those attributes – in culturally hindered Malta – hardly helps.

It is entirely symptomatic of how impoverished Maltese society is, intellectually and rationally, that it cannot deal with a rational mind and correct use of language and must portray such people as “thinking they’re something”.

Oh, and in current usage, words like ‘pettifogging’ are used only ironically.

So obviously, you’re not a friend as defined in the dictionary of the country where the word was coined, but a “habib”.

The first time I noticed your comments was when you were sucking up to some rancid Mintoffian trolls on Malta Today’s comments board, trying to get them to like you and to accept your other views by agreeing with them about Austin Gatt. And then I joined the fray because I couldn’t stand to see it. Arrogance, really? Austin Gatt, arrogant? Gatt is BRUSQUE, not arrogant. The trouble with this benighted society is that even people who are supposed to know how to speak English have the restricted vocabulary of a secondary-school pupil, using the wrong words and conveying the wrong meaning.

This is an example of arrogance: a cabinet minister and the Prime Minister’s chief of staff are discovered, by a series of flukes, to have a complicated web of secret offshore operations concealed from the Maltese banks and Maltese authorities (and this when they are the government), and instead of apologising and getting the hell out, they stay on defiantly, threatening and suing those who write about them, while the Prime Minister thumbs his nose at the public and the police protect them all from investigation and prosecution.

I have no patience for people like you, I’m sorry. You have no sense of perspective at all.

Friends are not people of whom you speak disparagingly and anonymously on the internet, so I hardly think you are his friend.

Secondly, and I have had occasion to bring this up with you on a separate matter – that of Austin Gatt and his “hidden millions”, I believe – you have personal animosity towards some individuals, rather than their political choices, which block your ability to see straight. Either that, or you’re simply not as intelligent as you must think you are.

Nowhere did I say that it’s OK for Andrew Borg Cardona to refer to anyone at all as ‘the bitch’ because Glenn Bedingfield does much worse.

On the contrary, I wrote that no man should ever refer to any woman as ‘the bitch’ (though it is quite all right to use the word for the Prime Minister), and that all those who went wild about it and issued statements should more properly have taken the Prime Minister’s aide to task – because the Prime Minister’s aide holds public office and has a very publicly sensitive role, while Andrew Borg Cardona does NOT hold public office, is not accountable to the public and can say exactly what he wants to.