THE dictionary has been extremely well thumbed this week as I’ve tried to find meaning in recent events.

For example, Cleveland Police defended giving their chief constable a £24,000-a-year “honorarium” by saying it was his reward for reducing crime by 17.3 per cent and successfully rolling out Neighbourhood Policing.

I have long been intrigued by Cleveland’s use of language. For example, down the side of their cars they sloganise: “Putting people first”. Whenever I see one, I ask myself “Putting people first ahead of what?” as I guiltily slam on the brakes because I fear I’m breaking the speed limit again.

Ahead of goats? Ahead of earthworms?

And the inference that Cleveland is unique in “putting people first” perplexes me. If you are at the front of a queue in a Durham police station when a little green man with big, googly eyes on stalks walks in, will the officer say: “Sorry, sir, you’ll have to wait.

Putting aliens first is force policy.”

Anyway, an honorarium is, by definition and by translation from Latin, “a gift made on being admitted to a post of honour”.

So if you volunteer to give up your time to become an honorary secretary of an organisation, you may receive when you start an honorarium to cover your expenses.

Or you may agree to be a guest of honour at a conference. Then you might receive an honorarium to cover your travel expenses and your time in cobbling together a speech.

But if you are so successful at the job for which you are paid a £126,471 salary – ie, you cut crime by 17.3 per cent and generally make Cleveland a far better force than it was – that you deserve a reward, it is not an honorarium you get but a bog standard “bonus”.

Schoolboy Latin tells us that bonus comes from the Latin for “good”. The dictionary says it probably comes from 18th Century Stock Market slang because for the recipient, no matter how much additional he received nor how much tax he might have to pay on it, as it was above his expected pay, he was “wholly to the good”. It was “a good thing”.

It was a bonus.

I was also fascinated this week by our dramatic front page picture of a tornado spinning above the Cleveland Hills.

A tornado starts as a funnel cloud, so called because it looks and acts like a funnel. When it touches water, it becomes a waterspout because it now spouts water. But when it touches land, it becomes a tornado – a strange, foreign sounding word.

The dictionary says tornado is “a blundered spelling”. In the 16th Century our navigators sailed into new waters and encountered new weather and new languages.

In Spanish, for example, tronada is a thunderstorm, from the verb tronar, to thunder.

In 1556, an English adventurer in the tropical Atlantic correctly used the Anglicised version of tronada: “We had terrible thunder and lightning with exceedingly great gusts of raine, called Ternados.”

But within 75 years our sailors had blundered.

There’s another Spanish verb, tornar meaning to turn. Because they’d heard this word, when they saw a turning, spinning cloud, they assumed it must be a tornado. In 1626, a captain complained of “a gust, a storme, a spout, a loume gaile, an eddy wind, a flake of wind, a Turnado”.

And so, 400 years ago, a thunderstorm turned into a far more dramatic tornado.

Are we now witnessing a common-as-muck bonus, with all its connotations of greedy, grasping bankers, spinning into a far more dignified sounding honorarium?