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To too far

Sir: Could you get Dot Wordsworth to devote a column to prepositions, and in particular, the use, or rather misuse, of ‘to’. Sky Sports and the BBC have used ‘defeat to’, rather than ‘defeat by’ and even the Daily Telegraph sub-editors, who I thought of as the last bastion of proper English, have allowed it through. At least there the meaning is clear, and I presume that the journalists concerned, knowing no better, have confused it with ‘lose to’. However, on the BBC news last night, their correspondent, referring to the Burma junta, said that they were ‘suspicious to’ the USA. The use here of ‘to’ rather than ‘of’ pretty much reverses the meaning of what she was trying to say.

John Duffield

Loughton, Essex

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