So, yes, I admit it – I’m a chronic purist when it comes to abbreviation, spelling and punctuation. I’m a bore, I’m going to hell in a hand basket for all my nitpicking, I should build a bridge and get the hell over it already, yeah, yeah, yeah – don’t even start, I’ve heard it all before, from foul-mouthed poets who can deliver a knockout blow from fifty paces and would make any other comers look positively juvenile, to haughty high society dames who think the measure of their worth is the height of their stiletto and the depth of their cleavage. Offenders all, and when I am King, first against the wall.

No, it’s not curable, and yes, it’s a petty matter which shouldn’t drive me into the loving embrace of a sanatorium, but there you go – when the world’s crapping out and atomic mushrooms are blossoming overhead, I’ll still be bent double over a restaurant menu, fiercely twitching at the gross injustice of a misplaced comma. And, whilst it is the opinion of some that a sufferer who can admit to and identify his shortcomings is well on the way to recovery, I, a sufferer for life with a chronic dose of the Corrections, will not be - and indeed do not wish to be – cured, as mine is the finest kind of malady – that which may be my downfall but brings the promise of a better world for all mankind.

The day that we all give up the pursuit of proper grammar and punctuation is the day that the white flag of surrender to guttersnipe virtues is seen over the carcass of language the world over. And with language being the bedrock of culture, you can only imagine the bland quagmire that will suck us into. Don’t even get me started on the insidious creep that textspeak is making, stealthily abbreviating its cryptic way into the common psyche and demolishing the nuance and delicate tracery of language, word by word. Centuries of reason and history, demolished by the convenience of a pocket toy.

I ask you with tears in my ass.