‘Madam, how dare you distort, desecrate and defile the English language as you did in your recent Reith lecture…’, ran a letter in my postbag. It was one of many responses to my Reith lectures, some angry, others supportive: ‘I am delighted that you were chosen to give the Reith lectures… those of us who love the language need a champion and now know that we have one!’

Some letters were bafflingly hostile: ‘Well missy, and what are you going to be when you grow up?’ But others were truly heart-warming: ‘Forgive me – a total stranger (unless we met at either L's eightieth or ninetieth birthday parties) taking up your valuable time. It is mainly to thank you for the pleasure you have given two old people with your first Reith lecture.’

Journalists too were divided. ‘Jean Aitchison has hit on precisely the right combination of novelty and controversy’, said Robert Hanks in The Independent. ‘Mind your language, professor’ was the Evening Standard headline, where A. N. Wilson announced that ‘What the professor says is half-baked, half true, and misses the essential point.’

Perhaps I should have been prepared. ‘What Aitchison has embarked upon, she may not realize, is the linguistic equivalent of delivering an anti-war speech in the Pentagon’, said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. For Robert Hanks in The Independent, my first lecture was ‘all perfectly sensible advice, but handing it out to Radio 4 audiences is like trying to set the Inquisition right on theology’.