George Monbiot hopes we “might find a language in which liberal graduates can talk with the alienated people of Britain, rather than at them” (Opinion, 29 June). Yet he uses three words in the article that I did not know despite, like him, being a former scholar of Brasenose College, Oxford. I had to look up precarity, fungible and feracious. I wonder how many “liberal graduates” know what they mean, so what hope for these “alienated people”? Only fungible was in any of my four dictionaries; the other two required internet searches. Fungible is used in legal contracts to mean interchangeable. Job insecurity would do perfectly well instead of precarity and fruitful for feracious. In searching for precarity I noticed an unfamiliar word, preciosity – over-refinement in the choice of words. If the cap fits…
Malcolm Hodkinson
Emeritus professor of geriatric medicine, UCL
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