SIR - Prof Douglas Johnson is to be congratulated for dispelling one spurious certainty about the origin of the expression "chauvinism" (letter, Nov 29), but in doing so he inadvertently created another.
By the time I began writing The Female Eunuch in 1969, the epithet "male chauvinist", usually preceding the noun "pig", was such a cliche that it was known principally by its acronym. Insecure males of John Prescott's kidney often wore ties embroidered with tiny pigs and/or the initials MCP. Not only did I not coin the phrase "male chauvinist", I made a point of never using it.
Prof Johnson does not comment on Dominique Voynet's use of the word "macho", which is an unusual example of a single word with two derivations: its spelling derives from the Spanish macho (which does not mean quite the same thing and is pronounced differently), and its meaning from a contraction of male chauviniste.