THIS page of opinion has been dominated these last few days by two prickly issues: the debate about whether Jeremy Corbyn is going to turn the clock back should he become Labour leader, and the debate about whether we should be picking brambles or blackberries.

So here’s a ha’penny worth on each.

Opinion polls are considered very unreliable these days, but words can still be used to accurately judge the size of support. The three other Labour leadership candidates are said to address party meetings or gatherings, which, the words suggest, are mild-mannered affairs with a few score of activists sitting calmly in a room. But Mr Corbyn holds a rally – a raucous, excited, mass meeting which American presidential candidates invented in the 1830s as a show of strength. It is originally a military word, meaning a rapid assembling of your troops ahead of battle.

So in the wordy opinion poll, Mr Corbyn, is clearly ahead.

One of his rallying cries is the need to restore Clause 4 of the party’s constitution. This clause committed the party to nationalisation until Tony Blair ditched it in 1995 to show the newness of New Labour.

Clause IV was originally co-written by one of the party’s founding fathers and one of my heroes: Arthur Henderson. He’s a hero because he has a great CV: mayor of Darlington in 1903, MP for Barnard Castle for 15 years, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, twice party leader, Nobel Peace Prize winner and even founder of one of the football clubs that united to form Newcastle.

In Darlington, near where he lived on Clifton Road, there’s a street named after him.

He was a Labour pioneer – when he was elected MP for Barney in 1903, he was only the party’s fourth MP; in 1908, he replaced Keir Hardie and became the party’s second leader; in 1917, he joined the coalition government and became the first Labour member to hold a Cabinet position.

As a pioneer, it fell to him and Sidney Webb to draw up the party’s first constitution, which included Clause 4 (originally they numbered it Clause 3d). That was in 1918.

We are now in 2016. Spinning the clock back to 1918 is a mighty big turn.

TO see if I could add to the bramble versus blackberry debate, I delved into the Oxford English Dictionary.

It defines a bramble is “a rough, prickly shrub”. The word “bramble” has been with us for more than 1,000 years and it comes from the same Old Germanic beginnings as the “broom” – a rough, scratchy shrub with yellow flowers.

The dictionary says that the blackberry is an equally old word, and it defines it as “the edible fruit of the bramble” which it describes as “an aggregate fruit consisting of soft, sweet, purple-black drupelets”. I like the word "drupelets" and aim to drupe it into conversation more often.

But it also says that “blackberry” can also refer to the the plant as a whole, not just to its berries. In fact, the very first written use of the word “blackberry” to mean a plant is in the Durham Plant Glossary, where it was written “blacebergan”.

The Durham Plant Glossary, which is the cathedral library, was copied in about 1120 from an earlier document, and is one of Europe’s four oldest lists of plant names.

So the “blackberry” is not an invader of the Northern “bramble” patch – its roots go down a long, long way.