AMAN was working hard in his garden when the vicar walked by and said: “I see you and the Lord are making a beautiful garden.”

And the man replied: “You should have seen it when the Lord had it to himself!”

Those of us who have tried our hand at cultivation know that gardening needs constant application. When I was a country parson in Yorkshire, I remember getting the garden into good shape, but all I had to do was go on holiday with the family for ten days to find on my return it had turned into a jungle.

What goes for gardening is true also of speech and language. It’s an endless battle for clarity of meaning. TS Eliot spoke of “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings” and the need to “purify the dialect of the tribe”.

How easy it is to say something crass.

An expression that we hear at least once a day on the radio is: “It begs the question.”

Usually this is used wrongly. To beg a question is not simply to ask a question – but that’s how it’s come to be used. To beg the question is to assume part of what the question is asking. A begged question is a loaded question such as: “When did you stop beating your wife?” It assumes that you had been beating your wife in the first place.

When you mention the use of language, the usual response is: “Stop nitpicking. It doesn’t matter. It’s only words.”

But that’s precisely why it does matter – because words are thoughts, so when we use words wrongly we misrepresent what we mean to say.

Another common misuse is: “I refute that.”

A refutation is a collected series of arguments which decisively disproves a particular proposition.

But all that many people mean when they say “I refute that” is that they merely deny it, gainsay it, shout it down.

How about “rise to a crescendo”? That’s another expression we hear five times a week.

But it’s wrong. A crescendo is not the pinnacle of sound. It is a gradual rise in volume.

Most irritating is the mauling of language in the interests of political correctness: “Each child has their own pencil case.”

“Each” is singular (as in “each one”) but “their” is plural. So why this deliberate mistake?

It’s because we’re no longer allowed to say what we once did – “each child has his own pencil case” – for fear of sounding sexist.

And to say “his or her” is tedious.

So we end up saying something ungrammatical; that is something ugly.

It’s amazing how phrases enter the language and displace traditional usage. You’ve never heard the expression before and suddenly it’s on everyone’s lips. A recent example is “going forward”. They all say it. Whatever happened to “in future”?

Of course “man” has just about become obsolete.

We are all “guys” now – even girls call one another guys.

It probably doesn’t matter all that much, but in certain places it annoys. I squirm when cricketers are referred to as guys: it doesn’t go with yards and chains and white flannels – though I suppose it suits the philistine Twenty20 played in pyjamas.

Occasionally a usage is so wrong it becomes hilarious. I recall a national newspaper commenting on some workers’ support for a strike. The leader writer commented: “These supporters will add impetus to the stoppage.”

We should mind our language. In wartime it was even said: “Careless talk costs lives.”