I am lucky to live in part of the country where we only have four terrestrial TV channels and digital reception is poor: who wants hundreds of channels of drivel when four is sufficient? Well, lots of people do, and your idea of drivel and mine are probably different. But looking idly at a TV guide this morning over breakfast, I was struck by the programme titles on a couple of satellite channels, all clamouring loudly for my three-minute attention span:

1. Battle Stations, Battlefield Detectives, Great Crimes and Trials, Vanishings, Mega Disasters, In the Grip of Evil, Conversations with Killers, Cold Case Files, ...
2. Real NCIS, Battlefront, Deep Jungle, Megastructures, Seconds from Disaster, One Year On, America's Hardest Prisons: Supermax, ...

Without being familiar with the content of the channels, I think you might find it rather hard to guess which was which: in fact, 1 is the History Channel and 2 is National Geographic.

My point is that by going for such needlessly sensationalist (and also undescriptive) titles, whoever thinks up the titles is not only underestimating the intelligence and discrimination of viewers, but also devaluing language: if everything has to be so "wow, look at me, I'm so exciting" - what words are left for things that really are significant and should be attention-getting? It's a bit like using the F word all the time in conversation (or your blog!), then having nothing satisfying to say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

"The horse jumped fantastic" - Zara Phillips, interviewed on the Today programme about her win at the World Equestrian Games in Germany, BBC Radio 4, yesterday morning.

Call me old-fashioned, but I expected the Queen's granddaughter to have a slightly better appreciation of grammar than this.

At first, I thought it might be a slip of the tongue in her excitement, but she repeated exactly the same mistake in two other interviews.

So: is it true that even a first class education (which she presumably received) is not sufficient to drum in the difference between an adjective (fantastic) and an adverb (fantastically: would be even better to add "well"). Or is it perhaps that she wants to achieve the common touch by speaking like her less well-educated contemporaries?

This is not without precedent: Tony Blair has developed many Estuary English pronunciations and mannerisms since he became PM, for example.

"Last week, at the end of America's National Speed Week, when large numbers of mostly men descend on the salt flats and drive as fast as possible, Dieselmax broke the 300mph barrier. " - Guardian unlimited web site, 22 Aug 2006

I am looking forward to meeting this new breed of mostly men: the mind boggles at which bits are not of the traditional masculine kind. Perhaps they wear pinnies?

If the writer had taken the trouble to proof his words, he might have realised that he meant to say "large numbers, mostly of men,".

The Guardian was always known for the carelessness of its sub-editing in the days of hot metal typesetting (hence its nickname, Grauniad), but now that subs are a thing of the past, such howlers are common in even the most illustrious publications, as I shall no doubt report in the future.