Master of banality
Sir: It was cheering to read in Giles Auty's review (Arts, 28 November) that someone else pronounces 'banal' correctly: I thought I was the only one left. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary of 1959 gives priority to tay'nal' with 'bann'er as an option. In the days when I learned to pronounce it, it was a rarity, described by the Fowlers as, 'one of those foreign feathers in which writers of literary criticism love to parade'. Others used trite, commonplace, platitudinous. Presumably the fake French pronunciation tanahT arose when the word suddenly became fashionable with litterateurs who found it chic, being mal entendu by the canaille. It must be the only case where a French borrowing (1753) has reverted to the original pronunciation and, incidental- ly, contradicted the trend of the recessive accent.
What next? Will others join me in using 'equerr'y' and `decay'dene? Probably not: the move, led by the BBC, is the other way. The prefixes 're' and 'de' which used to be lightly touched on in depend, denigrate, derange, reform, replace, recover, are now hit hard to give us dee-pend, dee-nigh- grate, dee-range, ree-form, ree-place, ree- cover; and so, horribly, on.
Charles Fyffe
52 Holmdale Road, London NW6
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