While I agree with Giles Fraser (Loose canon, 17 November) that God’s forgiveness is offered freely, whatever the sin, there is a proviso. The sinner must acknowledge their sin and ask for forgiveness. With the forgiveness comes God’s instruction: “Go, and sin no more.”

Val Spouge

Braintree, Essex

• Decca Aitkenhead, interviewing Michelle Dockery in last Saturday’s Weekend magazine, told us the Downton Abbey actress came from “the Essex town of Chadwell Heath”. That’s rather like describing Brighton as a Sussex fishing village or Stratford International as the gateway to Paris and Europe. The northern part of Barking and Dagenham was swallowed by London’s postwar urban sprawl and officially left Essex in 1964.

Neil Levis

London

• I was interested to read of the social mobility of corduroy trousers (Report, 13 November). When I, as a 17-year-old art student, began wearing cords in the mid-1960s, my father, a blunt Yorkshireman born in 1898, exclaimed: “Corduroy trousers! What are you wearing them for? Them’s workhouse clothes!”

Peter Betts

Liverpool

• I wish Alan Greenslade-Hibbert luck in his campaign to have “latte” pronounced like paté (Letters, 17 November). Can he add that in Italian “gi” is spoken as a “j” so it’s Don Joe vanni not Don Geo vanni. Then we could start on tiramisu.

Dr John Doherty

Vienna, Austria

• Re the correct pronunciation of latte, it does not rhyme exactly with pâté, as the emphasis should be on the first syllable. Therefore, satay would be a better example.

Steve Vanstone

Wolverhampton

• True semantic change is inevitable (Letters, 16 November), but I would still like to know if an argument has been rebutted or refuted.

Tom Swallow

Kenilworth, Warwickshire

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