Last month Robert Danny, a reader from West Molesey, Surrey, highlighted a disturbing trend. "Can someone tell me", he asked, "when and why slippery conditions became slippy"?
Always ready to respond to appeals like this, his fellow letter-writers had plenty of ideas – but they also took the chance to vent their own frustrations about the uses and abuses of the English language.
Over the following fortnight, dozens of new words were duly arraigned. The debate also touched on some important questions. Should we try to prevent words from entering the language? Who decides which ones make the cut? And is it even possible, anyway?
Now we bring you the highlights of that debate. Wherever you stand,...