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I NEARLY choked on my cornflakes the other day when reading a letter in the London Timesfrom Prof Richard Dawkins. It was not, as you might think, about his favourite subject, Darwinism, even though last week marked the 150th anniversary of the theory of evolution. No. It was a complaint about the misuse of a verb, writes Frank McNally.

His gripe was with someone who had spoken of "addressing issues". Addressing was "for envelopes, golf balls, haggises, crowds and computer memory," he wrote. "Not issues." This is the sort of thing one is tempted to call a delicious irony, even though it doesn't quite fit any of the definitions of irony listed in my dictionary. It's merely quirky, I suppose. The point is that here we have one of Darwin's greatest disciples arguing for the linguistic equivalent of the fixity of species. Even if it's not irony, it's still delicious.