Our grandchildren will laugh at us

A READER continues the thread on the grammatical difference between "fewer" and "less" and on pedantry in general. He writes: "Pedants are like little Hitlers. There ought to be fuhrer of them."

HOWEVER, it's not pedantic to point out that in Tuesday's item on Pythagoras I referred to the old chap as Pythagorus. That is an old device we literary types call total bloody incompetence.

INTERESTING, isn't it, to see exactly what the Green Party stands for? Anyone who imagined it was all about solar powered homes made from tree bark will have had a rude awakening as Natalie Bennett , the Australian party leader, produces a wish-list which includes axing the armed forces, allowing anyone to join terrorist movements, scrapping all immigration controls and putting the Queen in a council house. Not so much bark as barking.

OH, spare me yet another bout of synthetic outrage. I doubt if a single black American was offended by Benedict Cumberbatch's clumsy reference on US television to "coloured" actors. While the usual self-appointed pundits see the words as evidence of some sinister thought-crime, most Yanks will accept it as an old-fashioned English guy using an old-fashioned expression. In Britain, people of a certain age or class tend to use "coloured" not because they are racists but because they still think it is the polite and acceptable term; many of them regard "black" as blunt and rude. In today's politically-correct Britain we are supposed to throw up our hands in horror at the term "coloured people" while approving "people of colour," as used by Lenny Henry. It is all deeply silly and, believe me, our grandchildren will laugh at us. In the United States, the oldest-established civil-rights movement was founded in 1909 and, despite occasional discussions, has never changed its name. It is proud to be known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And in 2008 the NAACP declared that the word "colored" was "outdated and antiquated but not offensive." That ought to settle things but you can't help feeling some people enjoy moving the goalposts in order to be permanently offended.

AND on to people of fat. All over the world, drivers are getting chunkier. You might imagine the correct response is to help them get thinner. Dream on. A senior Ford executive announced this week that the motor industry is hard at work designing bigger cars to cope with fatter bums and new technology to make up for the slower reactions that go with lardarsery. The more you accommodate a self-inflicted problem, the more you encourage it and the worse it gets.

RESIDENTS in South Wales are the latest in the UK to be recruited as coppers' narks – sorry, public-spirited volunteers – to nick drivers speeding through their villages. The project, which could involve speed-checkers reporting their own neighbours, results in offenders first being sent a warning letter and a polite request to slow down. If they are caught again, as the police put it, "they may become subject to police-led speed enforcement activity." This may be a cheap way to improve road safety but, as anyone who knows village life can testify, it is also a chance to settle old scores.

A READER once told me (far away and long ago, you understand) how he got a speeding ticket and then discovered that his neighbour was a civilian operating the very same speed trap. "You should have let me know," sympathised the neighbour. "We always tear up our mates' tickets."