Our indefatigable letters page correspondent D.K. Henderson complained the other day that too many people are getting married this year: "For the second Saturday running, our Letters page has been swamped by couples whose only concern is to tell the world at large about their future plans (when the world at large couldn't care less)." His prime concern was that this encroachment limited the expression of readers' viewpoints, and he wants a stop put to it.
The man has a point. But these engagement notices are paid for. They are a form of advertising, and no newspaper willingly refuses advertisements.
However, our "Social and Personal" columns are an undoubted oddity. They are for people who want to advertise, but who do not wish to be associated with the vulgarity of advertising. Hence the engagement notices cling together in ring-fenced exclusion from the mass of people who are engaged in filthy commerce, actually selling things, in the equally oddly-named "personal columns" on the back page of the paper.
But D.K. Henderson's implication that these newly engaged people and their advertisements do not involve "viewpoints" is wrong. A viewpoint does not necessarily have to be spelled out: a silence can speak volumes.
As often as not there are up to six people involved in each engagement notice - the happy couple and their parents. Usually, it is the parents of the prospective bride who express satisfaction in announcing the engagement: we are given no clues at all to the emotions of the young man's parents. Are they also pleased, or are some horrified? Sometimes the young couple mucks in to announce the news "together with their parents" as if they could not feel confident leaving it to the older folk.
There is much to be read between the lines. Various degrees of pleasure are expressed. Some young women's parents are merely "pleased" to announce the news, others are "very pleased" and more are "delighted". It is only a matter of time before someone is "over the moon".
Not infrequently, no human person whatsoever is involved in making the announcement: quite simply, "the engagement is announced between . . . " leaving The Irish Times in a quandary as to where to send the bill.
Some rash folk simultaneously announce the engagement "and forthcoming marriage", but most are not so hasty.
Indeed, there is a small team in this office working on a top-secret new advertising project for broken engagement announcements. All that is needed is to find the right form of words, or column title, and a decent marketing heave will do the rest. Jilt, Ditch and Heave-Ho are among the promising titles suggested so far.
We are targeting the separated and divorced crowd for potentially lucrative advertising, too. There is good money to be made if we can get the thing right. Column names already up for consideration include Spliced and Split as well as Cleave and Leave, though some of us favour the more adventurous overtones of Breakaway.
Still, you would miss the old Antisocial and Impersonal column we used to run before the days of political correctness.
All right. Now to more serious matters. The inadequacies of the Irish educational system were shamefully exposed the other day when 12-year-old Burmese twins - Johnny and Luther Htoo - were identified as the leaders of "God's Army", a 100-strong breakaway faction of Burma's Christian Karen Union guerrillas.
The two enterprising youngsters and their jungle army took 700 hostages in a Thai hospital and fought a fierce battle with heavily-armed commandos before releasing all the hostages unharmed.
How is it we cannot inculcate similar values of leadership, independence and entrepreneurship among our own pre-teens? Why this foolish insistence on the three Rs, the plodding route through secondary school to third-level education, and then that dreary causeway, the career path, when all the time, our young people's hidden potential could be realised, perhaps even in an open-air setting, before they enter their teenage years?
Johnny and Luther Htoo, who are reputed to have mystical powers which make their followers invincible, were pictured on the front of Tuesday's papers holding a press conference. Luther was smoking - rather professionally - what was described as a "corn-husk cheroot", but the twins are committed Christians and we were told they don't do drugs or alcohol.
Idolised by their followers, they are ideal role models who should be instantly adopted by our far-too-conservative primary schools.