BONKERS BANKORRUPT

Athens News' always expertly edited 'Letters to the Editor' is astonishingly generous to one Gordon Monaghan ('Sage of the Peloponnese') by printing his twerpish correction to an understandable cleaning up of the ugly misprint, 'bankorrupt'.

Except, as the buffoonish Monaghan points out, it was not a misprint.

It was

"meant to be a deliberate play of words, ie that Greece is both bankrupt and corrupt. Hence the particular spelling of the word.

I suppose it serves me right for being a little too smart with my wordplay."

The vanity of the man. The sheer ignorant vanity.

There is not a trace of smartness or sprightly wordplay to that grotesque concoction with which only someone cloth-eared and word-blind could have decided to proceed.

Daily, all of us come up with puns and variations, some of which are worth sharing but the majority embarrassingly lame and best forgotten. Our feel for the look and music of words allows us to filter, edit or reject.

From the consistently high quality of the letters page, the editor is gifted in this area and understandably identified 'bankorrupt' as a particularly clunky error that would reflect badly on Monaghan if it went through.

In truth, the printed 'clarification' was an even more disastrous own goal.

While on the subject of goofs, Alexandra Smithies in her letter preceding GM's, seems to think that 'decadent' means thousands of years old. What I didn't know - and do now, thanks to this page - is that the word

"has long been around in culinary lingo to denote a taste or quality of a dish or ingredient hard to resist."