Words: rust, n.

HEINZ IS closing the Harlesden outpost of its world-wide operation, and The Grocer quotes its president Bill Johnson, who does not want the firm to be "a decentralised collection of unaligned autonomous affiliates". Tautology is scarcely the word for it, I remark to the Shakespeare scholar Katherine Duncan-Jones, who recalls that her father was a stickler for meaning: he fought a doomed battle over postgraduate (graduate is sufficent) - moreover, when a helpful removal man pointed out some rust on a fire, he replied, "That's not rust, it's corrosion - it's non-ferrous metal."

Rather than be dumbfounded, a cannier removal man would have quoted Johnson on rust: "the red desquamation of old iron" and "the tarnished or corroded surface of any metal".