To the Editors:
In the October issue, Geoffrey Sampson portrays himself as a pathetic victim of “censorship” imposed by Harper & Row under my threat of libel action, after I had “complained to Fontana/Collins” (the British publisher of 20th-Century Culture, the reference work in which his entry concerning me appears), and claims that I “rush[ed] to law in order to suppress freedom of expression.” These are brazen lies.

I was never in contact with either publisher. I did correspond with the editor, Lord Bullock, providing him with ample documentation that the entry contained a series of disgraceful fabrications. The question of a libel action never arose. I will gladly make available my letters to Lord Bullock, and the publishers will surely confirm that I had no contact with them at all, thus settling the matter conclusively.

Sampson chooses to begin the story with his book Liberty and Language, and I will do him the favor of not tracing it back any further. Sampson describes this comical tract, which is the source of several of the more fanciful allegations in his Fontana entry and has been shown in the professional literature to be a structure of sheer fantasy and fabrication (see, e.g., D. Lightfoot, Journal of Linguistics, 17.1, 1981), as “a book analyzing the links between Chomsky’s linguistic and political ideas.” Sampson attributes to me the idiotic view that “syntax refutes liberalism” while adopting the equally idiotic position that his Thatcherite views are supported by semantics;