Pre-occupied

MOST of the posher papers have what are known as readers’ editors, an accustomed reference point for all manner of feedback. Sometimes they’re called ombudsmen.

Much of their in-tray seems not to concern the day’s great issues, rather grammar and style. Sometimes I think I’ve adopted the role, and very happily, though it’s not the intended style at all.

To put it differently, it’s Gadfly readers – truly the salt of the earth – who have again contributed today’s column. Mr Peter Jefferies’ recollection of Mark Twain’s assertion that he became a newspaper man because he couldn’t find honest employment may be considered a mere diversion.

There’s an email, for example, from the Rev David Kinch, a retired Methodist minister in Crook who would certainly recognise the text at the top of the page. “I am aware that language changes and develops,” he writes, “but some of the modern changes make me squirm.”

Particularly he is peeved by the proliferation of the prefix “pre” – pre with every four gallons, or so it seems – a subject to which the column has several times referred.

On two days last week, for example, reports talked of “pre-salting” roads, a phrase which (to no great surprise) appears to have come from a Durham County Council press release.

“Does this mean,” ponders David, “that the salting pundits know in advance when the snow will fall, or do the salters practise without salt so that they are perfect at it when the snow does come? The mind boggles.”

Worse followed. Yesterday’s paper used the nonsensical pre-salting phrase in a banner across the top of the front page. The poor minister’s reaction can only be imagined. Probably it was “Gosh.”

We wrote last September of an epidemic of pre-booking – you can book after the event? – and, for that matter, of the absurdity of forward planning units. Others plan retrospectively?

Amid the plethora of promiscuous prefixes, however, none is more grotesque than the ill-conceived “pre-existing condition”. What on earth is one of those?

JAMES Dykes, that man about Barnard Castle, forwards a list of Internet-originated jokes with punning intent. Many are familiar but in view of the foregoing (as they say) two are particularly apt.

There are the two peanuts which walk into a notorious bar, one of which is a salted, and there’s the chap who walks into the same bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm.

“Pint of Strongarm for me,” he says, “and one for the road.”

Asprat to catch a mackerel, no doubt, another Teesdale reader – who seeks anonymity – returns whence it came a story about new lighting in Barney.

John Yarker, the mayor, didn’t attend the trial run. “I’m waiting with baited breath for the lights to be switched on formally,” he said.

The word, of course, should be “bated” – shortened from abated.

“Baited breath” has nonetheless appeared 63 times in the 22 years of the Echo’s electronic archive – but until the next item but two, just hold it there.

FOLLOWING last week’s note on the misuse of the wondrous word “egregious” – its egregious misuse, indeed – a note arrives from a medical gentleman in Middlesbrough.

Though he draws attention to the spelling of the word “governer” in a headline – “It seems appropriate for a story about sixth form colleges” – our correspondent particularly notes a website, simply called Egregious, run by a disaffected doctor under the pseudonym Stealth Anorak.

“Due to the chronic underresourcing of the NHS, employees are being forced to do more and more with less and less as the money is sucked away into more managers,” Stealth Anorak writes.

There’s also an entry about curious goings-on at a hospital identified only as Wonderland.

“As it’s based in the North-East,” adds our man, “it won’t take you long to work out the rhyming reference.”

IMPOSSIBLE amid all this private consultation to avoid a supplementary email in return.

“For heaven’s sake, doc, what’s a pre-existing condition?” Perhaps because it defies both medical and semantic science, answer comes there none.

IN the Echo these past two decades, the word “egregious” has been employed almost exclusively for my own ends, though once by the Rev Dr Peter Mullen and twice, both times correctly, by Mr Tony Kelly, a Hear All Sides regular from Crook.

On one occasion, coincidentally, he was writing about the vituperative Dr Mullen’s role as chaplain to the Stock Exchange – “So what is a Christian priest doing in close proximity to that egregious bastion of greed and avarice?” Belatedly, however, Mr Kelly scores an own goal.

“Your correspondent may know how to use egregious but ‘close proximity’?

Have you ever seen a distant proximity?” asks the Darlington correspondent who prefers to answer to That Bloody Woman.

She’s right, of course. Something’s either in proximity or it’s not, yet in the 22 years of the archive, the paper has used “close proximity” a nearthing 597 times.

Close, but no… WHICH seamlessly leads us to the Reverend Canaan Banana, a Methodist minister also mentioned in last week’s column.

It was with reference to Mr Banana, indeed, that Dr Mullen felt constrained to use the adjective “egregious”.

Canaan Banana was the “puppet president” of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe – or at least he was when Paul Wilkinson, then a journalist on The Times, interviewed him in Harare in 1982.

Paul, now in Knaresborough, recalls that Banana fled to South Africa via Botswana after being accused of sodomy, but later returned and was jailed and defrocked – “or whatever the non-conformist equivalent is.”

He claimed, Paul recalls, that the charges were a political smear – “I suppose it didn’t help that his middle name was Sodindo.”

…and finally, Baz Mundy in Coundon, near Bishop Auckland, recalls that when he was a kid, his mum would send him to the shops with 50p. “I could get a Wham bar, a bag of pick’n’mix, a comic book, a can of fizzy pip, a big bag of crisps and a gob stopper and still come home with change.

“You can’t do that these days – and why?” CCTV.

True grit or pinch of salt, the column returns next Wednesday.

Off the map

DAVID Wallace in Butterknowle – west Durham – sends an airport location map published by Premier Holidays for the Isle of Man.

“We give you peace of mind,” they promise, though they do appear to have become a little disorientated en route.

By relating the key to the map, Newcastle is now near Hull, Liverpool has taken off for Torquay, Leeds has crabbed eastwardly (says David), Manchester is near London City and Newquay, hitherto believed to have been in Cornwall, is just up the road from Durham.

David’s especially irked by an omission, however. “They appear to have missed off Butterknowle International altogether.”