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No journalist on a so-called quality newspaper would ever write 'shapeing', 'tapeing', 'gapeing' or 'rapeing'. And yet twice in recent months I have seen the use of the non-word apeing'.

The first time was in a feature in the Independent by Robert Fisk where his 'apeing' was unfortunaly picked out in a standfirst; the other came from the Guardian in the headline to a piece about a follow-up to Cadbury's Gorilla TV commercial.

In both cases, the sub-editor presumably believed 'apeing' to be an acceptable alternative to 'aping' in the way, say, that 'ageing' is to 'aging'. It is not. The error is no doubt accounted for in the failures of modern education (harrumph, harrumph!).

The Spectator, meanwhile, was guilty in last week's edition of a mistake which I consider as reprehensible as the greengrocers' apostrophe. In an interview with RSC artistic director Michael Boyd, Mary Wakefield used ''til' as an alternative to 'until'. This arises from the ignorant assumption that this is how one spells the word 'till' - which is generally favoured over 'until' by the best writers.

I had dinner on Sunday night (Gee's - excellent) with David Crystal, widely acknowledged as Britain's greatest expert on English usage. He told me that this was a classic instance of 'hypercorrection', in which a person tries to avoid making an error in the use of language but overcompensates and in so doing makes another error. So now you know . . .

10:25am Thursday 10th April 2008

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