Sir, - May I put in a plea for tolerating "tremenjus" as a pronunciation of "tremendous"? In England, this pronunciation is (or was until recently) known as "Old U", or old-fashioned upper-class speech. "Hijjus" (hideous), "tejus" (tedious), "mejum" (medium) and "Inja" (India) are other examples, as well as our own "eejit" (idiot). The survival of these pronunciations in Ireland gives us a notion of how English was once spoken, just as American spellings such as "color" refer to earlier English usage.
Directors who put on 19th-century plays and wish to catch the period should be aware of these and other nearly-forgotten pronunciations like "balcony", "goold" (gold), "chaney" (china), and of course "tay" and "'otel". One might add "yaller" (yellow), now almost certainly confined to Hollywood tough speech.
The intrusive "y" in HibernoEnglish ("cyar" for car, "nyow" for now) was also once correct English usage. Chariot, on the other hand, was pronounced "charrot", rhyming with "carrot". John Keats certainly pronounced his own name as if it rhymed with that of W.B. Yeats; Lord Byron's name was pronounced "Biron".
If your correspondents need to worry about vulgarisation of English, let them campaign against words like "prioritise" ("1997 Grant Decisions Prioritise Access" from an Arts Council bulletin, Gawd help us) and the decay of the distinction between transitive and intransitive verbs ("agreed the allocation" - ibi- dem).
Your columnist John Boland is, fortunately, a stout defender of decent English. Does anybody still read Gowers? - Yours, etc., D. C. ROSE,
Oscar Wilde Summer School,
Bray,
Co Wicklow.