Arenas remain expensive, as some might say? (6)

I haven't cracked this one yet — but the brilliant team at Times for the Times have:

to someone, somewhere in the world, this word can be pronounced to sound like ‘stay dear’; I am currently reading Philip Roth’s <i>Portnoy’s Complaint</i>,  in which the eponymous character (an intellectual Jew) struggles to overcome his contempt for a woman from Hillbilly country, who is very good in the sack but whose lack of the fundamentals of education is evinced by her spelling of DEAR as ‘dir’.