I would settle for that if it was necessary. But as long as he's close enough to be bothered in person, he'll have to put up with that.
It's possible that pure metals were just my father's preference. He was very well known for his magical work with metal. He was also a royal, of course, and had more access to large amounts of pure metal than most. But the principle of metal magic work is about metal coming from the earth, and so the closer to the raw form it is in the earth... or at least that was how I was given to understand it. There are probably plenty of metal workers who use magic on alloys. I really wouldn't know the difference, personally; metal has never responded to my magic at all.
At least if we are stuck here for some time, we are guaranteed a multitude of new things to learn. There are certainly subtleties to anything sung, spoken, or written that will be missed by someone unfamiliar with the language. Even only knowing the language from a textbook can mean that some are missed. I've been working on my Spanish much more since visiting Mexico initially.