I tried to defend the use of so-called "journalese" by suggesting you had to know the rules before you could break them.

In the year or so I have penned this weekly column I have covered all manner of subjects.

Should Price Harry go to Iraq? One comment.

Can we survive global warning? Not a murmur.

Could we recycle more and save the planet? Apparently, according to one chap, I was wrong.

Should we publicly flog people who vandalize graves? No-one suggested we shouldn't.

But when I wrote about the misuse of the language it prompted a mass response. And those responses raised a few questions.

What is happening to the English language?

Why do people say or write one thing when they mean something else?

Does nobody teach anyone the meaning of words?

And here are a few examples.

Everywhere you go you hear people say they "should of" done this or "could of" done that.

The word they are really looking for is "have". The "should have" paid more attention at school, or at least they "could have"!

Another of my particular favourites is "decimate".

Outdoor sport is often washed-out or snowed off.

Nothing happens.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that decimate must have something to do with the number 10.

In fact it means the removal of one in 10 and you can trace it back to a terrible punishment meted out on the Roman legions two millennia and more ago.

The removal of one in 10 in those days was quite simply the drawing of lots and then the beating to death of one in 10 of the legionaries. And before you get too excited I do mean legionaries (plural of legionary) as a Legionnaire is a member of the French Foreign Legion.

So to use the word decimate to mean the wiping out of a weekend's football fixtures would seem to be just wrong.

And then there are those people who don't understand the double negative.

"I didn't do nothing" you often here someone accused of a crime stating.
They're trying to say they haven't done something.

But by saying "I didn't do nothing" they are actually saying they did do something!

The fact that a double negative actually turns something into a positive is one that escapes an increasing majority of people.

It does not work the same way with positives, you can actually stress a positive by adding another, not negate it.

You will, as always, get exceptions.

A famous linguist was lecturing, I think at Oxford, on the double negative. He stressed that a double positive was impossible, to which someone at the back of the hall replied "Yeah, right!".