I find it heart-warming that people with the brains to think up stuff like this should still be so diffident about their ideas. In a similar spirit I would like to offer up my own little website for your comments. It’s not going to change the world, as some of these shyly offered Internet standards have undoubtedly done, but it might just change the direction of your thoughts for a minute or two.

I want to know if you get what its all about; if it’s at the right level; if it’s boring and, if so, what I could do to spice it up; and whether you think you’ll ever visit it again.

OK, I’ve asked for it. No swearing, please.

What you realise is that the letterbox is the only point at which someone can intrude, unasked, into another person’s home. And, as such, it takes on an interesting psychological importance. One can’t help thinking that every letterbox reflects the personality of its owner.

There are the wide and generous ones, for example, that open easily, positively welcoming your missive to float on to the doormat. Their owners are clearly lovely people – or perhaps just the gullible type who take in and are taken in by everything.

Some residents, though, have equipped themselves with tiny, doll-sized flaps that force you to fold even a modest leaflet in half. These remind me of the pursed-up mouths of the disapproving spinsters you expect to find in a Victorian novel but not in 21st century West London.

Worse still, letterboxes both wide and narrow may have a defensive screen of bristles around their inner side, which traps your offering and turns it into something resembling a reluctant child’s homework before it ever hits the mat. The bristles are, I think, meant to stop draughts. Draughts? Through a letterbox? Just how sensitive can you get?

But of course every post person’s deepest hatred is reserved for the kind of letterbox that betrays its owner as not merely judgemental or over-sensitive but as a paranoid sadist. I am speaking of the dread spring-loaded letterbox. The springs of these devices are nicely adjusted to trap the fingers; their flap is honed to an edge that will remove a layer of skin thick enough to be painful but thin enough to prevent you calling your lawyer. Someone with a letterbox like this clearly hates the world and exacts a price when it tries to communicate.

So what kind of letterbox do you have? Have I made you feel bad about yourself? On enraged with me? Perhaps I have just sent you scurrying off to the hardware shop for the sort of letterbox that says what a great human being you really are.

So it’s a surprise to find him making a common mistake in a statement he issued about the recent ‘smearmail’ scandal that has engulfed Gordon Brown’s office.

His words:

What happened constituted a clear and serious breach of the Code of Conduct for Special Advisers. It cannot and has not been tolerated.

What’s happened here?

Sir Gus has tried to shorten his statement by making the word ‘tolerated’ do double duty, once with ‘be’ in the present tense and once with it in the perfect tense. Nothing wrong with that, except that readers have been short-changed in the verb department, which could leave them feeling slightly uncomfortable.

It should be possible to unpick the compressed sentence

It cannot and has not been tolerated.

into two separate sentences:

It cannot be tolerated.
It has not been tolerated.

But the ‘be’ is missing, leaving readers to ask subconsciously, as they scan the the first three words, ‘cannot what?’

The moral for us all: compression is good, but make sure you are still making sense. If Sir Gus had said

It cannot be and has not been tolerated.

he would have avoided the feeling of awkwardness that always comes from a failure of logic.

Perhaps the revised, ‘correct’ version sounds a bit pedantic, though. It might have been simpler and more forceful to say

It cannot be tolerated. It has not been.

What do you think?

The best thing a bit of Latin does is help you realise the full underlying meaning of words. So imperative, for example, doesn’t just mean very important, it means so damned important that the emperor (imperator) himself will not be best pleased if you don’t see to it right now. Gives an otherwise ordinary word a lot more flavour.

And bear-trap words like solipsistic. Piece of cake with a bit of Latin. The sol part means ‘only’ and the ips bit means ‘itself’. So someone who is solipsistic thinks only of himself (or herself, but I find it tends to be blokes).

Most wanted picture: Boris in a toga.

In children’s books, for example, of which I have written a few, word counts are sometimes strictly limited because the words have to fit round pictures whose size and position have already been fixed by a designer.

One gets cunning at shortening sentences without losing their meaning. An apparently short and direct sentence like

A camera has a lens that makes an image.

can be made even shorter by using the possessive case to remove both a verb and a subordinate clause:

A camera’s lens makes an image.

or shorter still by using the fact that in English you are allowed to turn almost any noun into an adjective:

A camera lens makes an image.

These changes have reduced 40 characters to 29 with very little loss of meaning. It’s true that the lens, not the camera, is now the subject of the sentence, but this makes little difference in practice when there is an accompanying image.

Tricks like this can make the difference between saying what you want to say or having to change the whole thing and say something different.

Not that I’m setting myself up as some kind of expert. It’s easy to get labelled as an idle, grumpy old charlatan who just sits back and spots everyone else’s mistakes. But the label is wrong: inside that unsmiling exterior is a heart of gold. Pure gold, because someone else’s mistake can be your improvement, your way to communicate better.

Here’s today’s example. It’s quite a subtle mistake, but the effect is to make the gears of communication grate instead of changing smoothly.

Unlike some parts of the UK there are plenty of NHS Dentists in
the London Borough of Hounslow.

OK at first sight, perhaps. But because it doesn’t fit the expected form

Unlike A, B is…

in which one thing is compared directly with another, it trips the reader ever so slightly.

Does this matter? Well, it’s a bit like your bank manager having a tiny coffee stain on her shirt. A detail, but makes you wonder about her competence. Even the smallest glitch in your flow of words reduces the value of your most important asset – trust.

So what should this say? It’s very easy to put it right. Just follow the formula.

Unlike some parts of the UK, the London Borough of Hounslow
has plenty of NHS dentists.

This is not just a style thing. It’s about making your writing completely transparent, a sheet of glass through which your reader can see your meaning without even realising the glass is there. And you don’t have to be Tolstoy: it’s largely a matter of following some boring old rules. And perhaps listening to some of your grumpier critics.