It is truly discouraging to see, in a column by Tony Judt about sensitivity to language, inchoate used as a synonym for chaotic [Words, NYR, July 15]. Although this solecism is quite common, it still pains the ears of those few of us who are sensitive to the etymological resonances of English words. Didn’t Professor Judt learn Latin at the fancy school he went to?

Judt replies, in what is presumably his last published letter:

Like most people of your kind, you assume too much: regarding both what I wrote and what you are qualified to infer. Inchoate means: Just begun, incipient; in an initial or early stage; hence elementary, imperfect, undeveloped, immature (OED). And that is just what I meant – the words begin to form but do not complete. If I had meant to say that they were chaotic I would have said so.

At the fancy school I attended (my education cost precisely nothing from the age of five to twenty-four: what about yours?) I was taught Latin, but also how to distinguish between knowledge and pedantry. I am glad to say that forty years later I can still smell the difference at fifty yards.