A manner of speaking

SIR – Professor Jennifer Jenkins of the University of Southampton may be right to castigate us for talking idiomatic English to non-native speakers (report, December 15), but she is wrong to paint us as “arrogant” if we speak English abroad. Many readers will have experience of trying to speak, say, French or Spanish in those countries, only to be met with a fluent English reply and an insistence by the other party that he or she needs to improve their English.

Idiomatic English has been an issue for donkeys’ years. In an episode of the international quiz show Going for Gold in the late Eighties, Henry Kelly asked three continental Europeans what they shouldn’t do to a gift horse. Their blank looks were not improved by hearing the answer. Philip Law

Cuffley, Hertfordshire

SIR – We have been introducing English-speaking French friends to a wide range of our idioms. Their favourite so far, seen on a poster in the Bletchley Park café, is tickety-boo. Barbara Jefford

Wendover, Buckinghamshire