Madam, - I read in Alison Healy's account of the racing at Cheltenham (March 13th) that race goers did not let the weather spoil their "craic". What on earth is this "craic" thing about which we hear so much?
When I was growing up in Derry in the 1970s we referred to fun as "crack". This normal English word was from the same derivation as "to crack a joke", "wisecrack" or "to get cracking".
Some time around the mid -1980s, however, Dublin-based newspapers - including, to its eternal shame, The Irish Times, started using the misbegotten term "craic". Why?
Is there any possibility you might drop this monstrosity and instead restore the perfectly usable word "crack" to its rightful position?
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- Yours, etc,
MICHAEL HILLS, Singapore.