THE English language is a rich and beautiful thing. Evolved over millennia, it consists of many oddities and eccentricities to trap the unwary.

Even here at Diary, we are not immune to the odd spelling mistake creeping into our copy.

For that reason, we are usually slow to point out or mock mistakes made by those less grammatically enlightened than ourselves.

However, there is a certain irony in Labour’s Coun Ruth Potter’s recent blast against the York Lib-Dem group for a questionnaire it released which was peppered with spelling slip-ups, including writing “daily” as “dayly” and “usually” as “uselly”.

“People will think that the council simply doesn’t care if they picked up this questionnaire. It is sending out the totally wrong impression,” crowed Coun Potter.

The red-faced Lib Dems hastily cobbled together an apology, which also contained a spelling mistake, and said the errors in the questionnaires had now been rectified.

But hold on Coun Potter, are you sure your own house is in order? Diary has in its hands a recent Labour group release which bemoans the fact that they were STOPED (in bold) from carrying out various good deeds in York by other parties on the council.

And if you want to get really pedantic, Coun Potter, the term “let-down”, in the context it was used in the leaflet, should be hyphenated.