Jack Windsor Lewis (here) either acclaims me as or accuses me of – according to your point of view – being a champion player of the rant against unusual pronunciations. He also names John Maidment in the same context. I can’t speak for John, of course, but my rants are always aimed at people who are speaking professionally and publicly, and who therefore (in my view) should take care that the style of speech they use, including the pronunciation of individual words, is not going to interfere with the transmission of information. Unusual pronunciations, in my opinion, hinder this by making the listener (and I include television viewers as listeners in this case) concentrate on the form of the communication rather than its content. In a parallel way, professional writers need to use both traditional orthography and accepted ’standard’ grammar in their published work, unless they specify otherwise – as Jack does for his blog.

This, therefore, is not a rant, but an observation. I was recently at a concert where the artists introduced each item with a short talk about either the composer or the work they were about to play, or both. In introducing a string quartet by Shostakovich, one of the quartet members said that the composer had been /kəʊˈhɜːst/ by the Soviet government into making statements and writing certain pieces of music. This is an unusual pronunciation of the word coerced, and I wondered how it had arisen. She was not a professional speaker, and possibly unused to addressing an audience, so it may not be surprising that she ‘mis-spoke’ (in the manner of some American presidents).

Two possible sources for the mistake come to mind – rehearse, which is a word very familiar to musicians, and cohere. Add to that the thousand-year struggle for the /h/ phoneme to retain its ‘proper’ place in English phonology, and it is quite understandable that confusion should reign, and a nervous speaker opt for the unexpected usage I, and about seventy other people, heard.

On the other hand, if it had been a BBC presenter …