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Is there a name to describe a person who collects carrier bags?Dr Wordsmith writes: Yes – a bag lady. Next!Dear Dr Wordsmith, You know when a widescreen film is being shown on an ordinary TV, they have to cut off the bits at either side to fit the rest of the picture on? Well, I wondered if there was any word to describe these bits?Dr Wordsmith writes: Why on earth would you want to have a word for them? Would you ever need to talk about them?Dear Dr Wordsmith, As a matter of fact, yes. May I pass on to another closely related topic?Dr Wordsmith writes: Be my guest.Dear Dr Wordsmith, I have noticed that when people want to dignify the urge to collect rather naff objects, they tend to invent posh names based on the Latin to make it sound more respectable. People who collect beer- mats or cigarette cards or postcards or chewing gum all have ludicrously inflated names for the activity. And I wondered if there was any name for the urge to give activities posh names to disguise their essential sadness?Dr Wordsmith writes: There may well be Anything else you wish to know?Dear Dr Wordsmith, Yes. But what if there wasn’t? What if nothing goes wrong, and nothing crashes? How can you use the term Millennium Bug if there is no such thing? Can you use a word to describe something that doesn’t exist? Are we justified in wasting good words on non-existent things?Dr Wordsmith writes: Yes.Dear Dr Wordsmith, Well, go on, give me an example of a word we commonly use, which describes something that doesn’t exist.Dr Wordsmith writes: How about “Utopia”? How about “progress”? How about “Promotion for Fulham Football Club”? Or “A cure for the common cold”? “A tuna and peanut butter sandwich”? How about, and this is really one for my atheist readers, how about “God”? How about…?Dear Dr Wordsmith, OK, I take your point.

Is there a name for these small reproductions on the back of a calendar?Dr Wordsmith writes: I am certain there must be.Dear Dr Wordsmith, Do you have any idea what it is?Dr Wordsmith writes: I haven’t the faintest. Next!Dear Dr Wordsmith, By this time next week we shall know whether there really was a Millennium Bug or not. That is why they print tiny reproductions of all 12 of the pictures on the back, to give you a chance to check the other illustrations.
Dr Wordsmith writes: Is this getting anywhere, may I ask?Dear Dr Wordsmith, Yes. He has expressed his willingness to tackle your end-of-the-year queries and to raise a glass to you all, so over to you, Dr Wordsmith!

Dear Dr Wordsmith, when I was buying calendars before Christmas I noticed that these days they are almost all wrapped in cellophane, which means you can’t have a look through them and make sure you like all the pictures The only one you can be sure of is the one on the cover.

IT WOULD have been sad to end the year without another visitation from Dr Wordsmith, our peripatetic expert on the way we speak today, so I am delighted to say that this unpredictable linguist has just blown into the office on his way from one Christmas-tide party to another. One in which the press does not always judge a Budget on the basis of the disposable income it leaves the average family with. One in which the parties do not merely approach elections running a Dutch auction on which one will reduce taxes the most.. It is then that the case for limited increases in taxation kicks in. At the very least, Ms Chen is suggesting a new, more mature kind of debate. But nobody thinks that a modern British health service – inexpensive compared with many other countries’ – will not need more money as well as further reforms. They may need to revisit those arguments – and in public.Mr Brown’s prudence on public spending has, so far, been based on the entirely correct view that public services have to show themselves capable of higher standards of delivery to justify increased spending.

But they used to argue, at least in private, that a measure of redistribution was in the enlightened self-interest of the better-off as well as the poorest, because of the more comfortable and less dangerous society it helped to provide. One of the oddities about the parliamentary answer Mr Brown could not make is that he probably agrees with most of it. During the John Smith period, the modernisers were rightly sceptical of appeals to “altruism” to underpin taxation. For example, Ms Chen says that Britain’s tax burden as a share of GDP is “at the low end of the international league table”. That is true by European standards but not by those of the US or the Far East. And she is at her least convincing when she argues from polling evidence that the public are willing to pay higher taxes for a more equal society.She is, nevertheless, clearly on to something.