When to use ご返事 and お返事?


[Here](http://oshiete.goo.ne.jp/qa/4953486.html?order=desc) is a discussion
about whether to use ご返事 and お返事, but there seems to be diverging opinions:

ご返事:

  * ご返事 is 謙譲語 (according to No.1)
  * ご返事 is seldom used for 尊敬語 (according to No.5)
  * ご返事 is for 謙譲語 AND 尊敬語 (according to No.4)

お返事:

  * お返事 implies intimacy (according to No.1)
  * お返事 is 美化語 (according to No.4)

Given that I always write in the context of business (sometimes about my
reply, sometimes about my client's reply), can I stick to always using ご返事 ?




`ご返事` sounds ungrammatical to me. If it is in use, then that may be an
idiolect/dialect. But I suspect that, for the majority of people, the
grammatical form is `お返事`. As I read your link, I feel that `ご返事` arose as
hypercorrection. Some people believe that the choice between `お` vs. `ご`
prefixes is strictly correlated to whether the word is a native Japanese word
or a Chinese origin word. This holds as a tendency, but to say that it
strictly holds is wrong. Nevertheless, people who believe this tries to put
`ご` to `返事` because it is onyomi.

