My word

You may have noticed the minor skirmish, Salut! vs Bill Taylor, in the Comments section of the second of the London/Paris items. All good clean fun, which started with Bill pointing out a typo - I managed to put a second a into camembert - and proceeded to an exchange of views on language and writing. By coincidence, The National launches its Saturday edition today (it is already Saturday in Abu Dhabi) with a new columm dealing with - as the heading for this article (and also my chosen name for the column) may imply - the use and abuse of English. It is my column, and the first article gives a little background to my role as a newspaper stylist and discusses the decisions we made while creating The National. So many people have opinions of what constitute good English that I have decided to reproduce that introductory piece here (though not quite here - see Comments.....