Tim Rundall's complaints against slipshod English has my entire support.

For nearly 40 years I tried to persuade my pupils that there were other and better adjectives than "nice".

I was not, alas, entirely successful. This overworked word has now been superseded by fantastic, which peppers the language of BBC presenters and sports and entertainment personalities.

Driven up the wall by this meaningless superlative, I wrote four times to the BBC without reply. I am convinced that Sally Taylor uses the word deliberately to annoy me.

My Oxford dictionary defines fantastic as "existing only in the imagination: unreal".

What a strange world these people must be living in.

-Maurice Packham, Horsham