In your editorial “Keeping it Small” in the Nov. 6 Gazette, you wrongly assert that Tip O’Neill’s maxim “All politics is local” is ungrammatical. In fact, it is perfectly correct. As Bryan Garner notes in his authoritative Garner’s Modern English Usage, “As with similar ics words denoting disciplines of academics and human endeavor, politics is treated as singular when it refers to the field itself (all politics is local) and as plural when it refers to a collective set of political stands (her politics were too mainstream for the party’s activists).”

David Dollenmayer

Edgartown