To buy time for another year of this would be to no one's disadvantage Everybody knows the price of failure Perhaps in May 2000 the fault-lines will remain unchanged But time has a way of ameliorating situations. If not, at least the politicians of the province will have bought another last chance. How many last chances can Northern Ireland have? As many as it takes.. Celebrity illiteracy is now official. The public discovered this great new English deficiency last week, when the publishers of a concise dictionary ran a publicity stunt.

Members of a panel of ill-assorted glitterati, including Martin Amis and Vanessa Feltz, denounced top people for language- abuse - the only kind of perversion which can still be condemned with impunity. Tony Blair was blamed for banality and evasiveness, Zoe Ball bludgeoned for blather, John Prescott dunned for drivel These were unsurprising findings Media-speak always drifts into idiocy. Meaningful utterance has to be avoided in case someone is offended Obfuscation gives repellent policies electoral appeal. The mike is merciless: only split-seconds separate soundbites from Colemanballs If you talk a lot, you talk a lot of nonsense. In the consumer society, language is like every other commodity: cheapened by glut.

More worrying than the survey's routine judgements was the evidence of the judges' incompetence. They droned on pedantically about split infinitives, politically correct circumlocutions and the sanctity of adjectives They corruptly targeted their own political pet aversions. Apart from the verbally incontinent Chris Evans, all the most widely criticised offenders were politicians. Fussing about linguistic purity is not just an innocent form of silliness: it is snobbish and in its extreme forms can be chauvinistic and even racist. Language is a bright weapon to be kept sharp and wielded with flair: this does not mean that everyone's armoury must be identically regulated On the contrary, all should develop their own argot That is how language gets enriched.