Sir, - Several years ago a friend, at the end of her first week's work in the US, caused silence and then amusement when she asked her workmates where she could find some crack over the weekend.
About the same time your newspaper introduced us to the (often italicised) sham-Gaelic craic. This, I suspect, was intended to avoid any confusion between the activities of the fun-loving Oirish and the activities of drug maniacs preparing and using crack cocaine in the South Bronx slums and elsewhere.
Is it now safe for us to raise our heads and refer to the original "crack"? Terence Killeen (An Irishman's Diary, January 11th) seems to think so for he writes it in its original, bald, HibernoEnglish form.
But we should not dump that little gem, the craic. We should preserve it. For hasn't that glorious sub-editor's confection, like many another piece of floothery, forelock-tugging shamroguery, now become part of what we are? - Yours, etc., Denis Healy,
Devon Park, Galway.