IT was gratifying to see how many readers rose to the bait dangled from my tongue-in-cheek letter on the pronunciation of a local hamlet, and having digested their replies promise to 'ham' it in future.
The slurs of my being an 'incomer', which do not bode well for hopes of a socially-integragted Europe, are however completely justified. A Lancashire lad and proud of it, I only moved to Devonshire as recently as 1959.
It was some five years later that my wife and I remember picking wild strawberries growing in the neglected gardens of abandoned cottages in a ghost-village called Morewell Ham, and if it had been spelt that way on the map I wouldn't have mistakenly assumed it was the Dartington-American influence responsible for the strange (to me) pronunciation, first heard after they 'discovered' the place some years later.
Fearful of upsetting local sensitivities again, I would appreciate advise as to whether an interloper from up-country should say 'Plaisterdown' or 'Plasterdown', and indeed 'Harrowbeer' or 'Harrabeer'?
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Mike Challis
Buckland Monachorum
I AGREE with your correspondents about the pronunciation of Morwellham, but far more naff is the use of the childish word 'Goosie' to describe Goose Fair. Believe it or not, but we Tavistock children in the !940s and 1950s knew adult words and weren't restricted to nursery rhymes.
To us it was always Goose Fair and it was to Goose Fair we went to see and hear Phil Strong sell his patent medicine (Spanish Demiana) with its (alleged) Viagra-like properties. Whether it was any good, I was too young to know. Can any reader enlighten me?
David Stanbury