HEAVEN knows why the eye should fall upon the report of the proceedings of Leyburn Town Council in the Darlington & Stockton Times, but it has and here's the deal.

A market stall holder has applied to sell "swag"; the council has decided to check on what he means before granting permission.

The word has form. For years there was hardly a Beano burglar who didn't have a Batman mask, a black and white hooped jumper and a bag conveniently marked "Swag", for ease of apprehension.

Mr Rolf Harris's jolly swagman seemed to waltz rather later onto the scene, but he was something else entirely.

The Oxford English defines "swag" in a dozen different ways, including a wreath of flowers, a festooned stage curtain, a shop and "the bag of personal belongings carried by a traveller in the bush". Hence, of course, the swagman.

Perhaps most familiarly the word means "loot", though Leyburn town clerk Julie Forrest is quick to make clear that she fears the villainous media more greatly than any Friday market trader.

"I can't give you details. We're very wary of the press," she says. "The press don't put anything in fairly."

The applicant is identified only as Mr B Norris, who usually just sells bags. The town clerk says he's an extremely nice man - a jolly bagman, perhaps - who's traded there for years. "It isn't a big issue, we just needed clarification," she adds.

Deprived of the chance to illustrate today's column with a smiling Mr Norris, we turn instead to an illustration from a Waltzing Matilda website in Japanese.

It all seems entirely innocent: handbags at ten paces.

A "SWAGMAN", of course, is most commonly interpreted as a tramp. The north's most famous tramp, according to The Northern Echo in 2002, was Mel Bird, who regularly held bibulous court in the bus shelter in Leyburn market place and caused all sorts of problems for the town council. Any resemblance between Mr Bird and the Japanese swagman is, understand, entirely coincidental.

MRS Helen Goodman's selection from an all-woman short list as Labour's candidate in Bishop Auckland may have gone as greatly against the principles of punctuation as it did those of equality.

Mrs Goodman, chief executive of the National Association of Toy Libraries, wrote to party members about "Bishop Auckland with it's villages" and about hearing "constituent's problems", thus suggesting an electorate of one.

Still, she may still be grammatically preferable to Dr Mo O'Toole - Alan Milburn's former wife - whose letter to the faithful was strewn with errors.

Also unable correctly to use the apostrophe - "it's predecessors", indeed - Dr O'Toole talks of the achievements "of those of ours who served before us", "considering me in you selection" and contacting her "at one of the umbers on the leaflet".

Our informant is exasperated. "Don't they read this crap before they send it out?" he asks.

Ms O'Toole is a professor at Newcastle University.

A RATHER more problematic use of the apostrophe, we wondered a couple of weeks ago about how correctly to use the pesky thing in words ending with the letter 's' - as, Newcastle United's preferred version, in St James' Park.

Peter Daniels in Bishop Auckland - "Yes, a primary school teacher," he says - attempts to explain, though without mentioning his politics.

"One may add a single 's' to a word, regardless of the final letter, in order to denote possession. Amos's or Daniels's would be correct."

In the case of a plural, where an 's' has already been added, the apostrophe would suffice.

"As a child," adds Peter, "I was taught, wrongly, that any word ending in 's' took the apostrophe only. The reason for the persistence of the misunderstanding is one's reluctance to accept that one's primary school teacher is wrong."

He's right.

GREMLINS gobbled part of last week's column, the regurgitations completely spoiling my breakfast.

It had started with memories of the Pope's visit to York in 1982, and particularly of the vivid coverage of Dorothy Byrne, a young, feisty and hugely talented reporter in the Echo's Durham office - a lady, we'd concluded at the time, who'd go far.

It should have ended, but didn't, with news of the latest controversy over Channel 4's late night line-ups - this time a programme screened last week about volunteers undergoing 48 hours of Guantanamo Bay-style torture.

Though many criticised it, Channel 4's head of news and current affairs was eloquently defiant. She was the selfsame Dorothy Byrne, perhaps gone a little bit too far after all.

STILL, even half a story prompted an email from Judith Moore in South Shields, who recognised Dorothy as her old classmate from Layton Hill convent in Blackpool. They'd even bunked off together, says Judith, to go sunbathing by the open air pool. Have they intelligence of this at Channel 4 news and current affairs?

MORE on "stythe", as in "scumfished by the stythe". A really delightful expression, writes Rosa Good from Neasham, near Darlington, whose grandfather - from Leeds - used "stythe" to mean acrid fumes, often in the kitchen.

Cliff Howe in Billingham discovers a 1786 lease from Dan Dew of Auckland Castle and George Brooks of Middlesex to James Forster: "Collieries, coal seams, limestone, limestone quarries in Coundon, Coundon Grange and Byers Green... with free liberty to erect and make all engines necessary for the avoidance of Water and Styth, and also erect Hovels and Lodges for the persons about these Pitts."

Cliff's originally a Coundon lad, too, accustomed back in the 1950s to stythe ("as in Forsyth," he insists) when the Yorkshire pudding mix was poured onto the hot fat in the pudding tins.

In breezy Billingham, of course, stythe is much rarer. It's the excellent Marks & Sparks' pudding mixes, adds Cliff, which have happily ended all that.

'STOOR" is different. Stoor, says George Tunstall in Harmby, near Leyburn, is the dust which rises up from sweeping the yard, or wherever - and stouring is something else again.

"Stouring is when there's light snow which is blowing about and drifting."

Most of these ramblings concentrate on North-East dialect. "Get two owld dalesmen together," George insists, "and you'd barely understand a single word they said."

LAST the good news. The rankling ankle which for four months has made a macerating mark on these columns has finally cleared up.

Thanks to the many who asked solicitously about its ulcerated abandon, to the practice nurse at last made perfect, to the lady in Scorton who sent red cabbage and apple chutney (for internal use only) and to the gent in Lanchester who enclosed what his family calls a Brown Universal Voucher - in other words, a tenner.

The BUV will be doubled and given to charity, in this case a Methodist charity, accompanied by a note of relief.

Back on both feet, the column returns next Wednesday.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk /news/gadfly.html

Published: ??/??/2004