Every morning at around 9.15 there's a young(ish) man in a cycling helmet and, indeed, on a bicycle who pauses on his journey to wherever in the alleyway near my house.

He's forty or so. He is slim. He always has iPod headphones; he is always texting someone; he has always just lit up a cigarette. One foot on a pedal, one on the ground - I must look next time to see if he wears cycling clips.

I assume he is not allowed/will not allow himself to smoke at home; he is contacting someone he does not wish those at home to know he is contacting; he is a creature of habit.

What is he listening to? Does the person at the other end of his texts know he is always in the same place every morning? Would they be put off by that regularity?  I think my non-cycling man imagines he is somehow breaking away. I think he is entirely trapped.

I was sitting in the theatre today waiting for the play to begin. (If you're interested it is a new play about The Kinks - great to hear their songs again, but the 'book' was weak.)

A few rows in front was a head with shoulder length hair, glossy, colour of iron filings, 60s flick-ups at the ends. If you don't know what those are you weren't around in the 60s. Every time the head moved the glossy hair danced. All very fine but the head was on the meaty shoulders of a middle-aged man in thick glasses and a black faux-leather jacket. Why did the hair, which should have looked so appealing, seem to me repellent on this man?

I turned for help to my companion, who is as much of a snoot as I am (see lower blogs and keep up there at the back). 'Is this prejudice on my part or good taste?' I asked. He sat for a moment in silence, and then said, 'You could say you are showing discrimination, which neatly covers both without directly saying which.'

We then had a discussion about whether to BE discriminating would imply the same, whereas to discriminate doesn't work both ways because in its prejudicial sense you would need to be discriiminating against something. I felt a blog coming on...

Crossing Westminster Bridge, dodging tourists. A Scot in multi-tartan, cap, sporran and all the trimmings is playing on his bagpipes. Foreigners pause to have their photos taken next to him. As I pass a young woman (no idea where from) stoops to put some coins in an upturned battered hat on the pavement in front of him, then places herself by his side to be snapped by her friend. 'And where're you from?' asks the bagpiper in a strong east London accent. Joy!

Last night I went to see a (very good) film. Of course, before it began there were the usual ads and trailers. One of these promised that the film it trailed would be 'totally unique'.  I was so distracted by this claim that I didn't take in what the name of this film was. What about slightly unique? Or relatively unique?

From this you can, indeed you should, conclude that I am what David Foster Wallace called a snoot (picky about language, bordering on pedantic) - and proud to be. I can be thrown off whatever course I am on when I hear someone say that something has been over-hyped or over-exaggerated. Words matter, and thinking about what they mean matters too. If we don't think about words we may end up at the wrong end of oppression - if, that is, there is a right one.

Am I overdoing it? I don't think so. Yes, okay, misusing the odd word when it's more or less clear what you want to say is no sin or crime or anything deserving punishment. But in the long run punishment might be what we get. Governments and demagogues who would like to be government rely on lack of attention to language.

As English-speakers we are lucky and relatively protected. But beware. In the 80s I produced a series of radio programmes about writers and politics. One of the contributors was Arthur Miller who was very exercised by what was happening at the time in still-communist still-Czechoslovakia. Czech and Slovak are minority languages: only Czechs and Slovaks speak them. If their government takes the language over, he said, and make words mean what the authorities want - as was indeed the case - while at the same picking off the few guardians of the language,the serious writers, then there was no longer a medium for expressing anything other than the government's version of the truth. English-speakers are rescued by each other - in India and Barbados, Canada and New Zealand, London and New York and Lagos. Something fresh will always come through.

But. When we don't pay attention to the nonsense all corporations now perpetrate in place of language - and I mean ALL big business, ALL large institutions including to my sorrow the BBC, we end up accepting euphemisms like collateral damage and extraordinary rendition as normal vocabulary. Or perhaps it's the final solution. We may not as individuals have done the damaging or rendering but having yielded the descriptions of them to mendacious government we are nonetheless responsible. All because we started by letting 'totally unique' pass us by. 

Don't lets ever say to ourselves or anyone else, Oh, it's just a form of words, a manner of speaking. No, it isn't. It's a failure to think. Set aside a lot of time (you will need it); then read David Foster Wallace who coined the word snoot (I think). He was brought up to be one. He is dead. But before he committed suicide he was an extraordinary writer.

By the way, I recommend the film I did see. "The Past", a French language Iranian-directed little masterpiece by Asghar Farhadi who was also responsible for the incomparable "A Separation".

At the corner of my street I have just passed a tallish, thin young man with mousy hair and a sparse beard. He had a...I'm not sure what to call it, a tiny fluffy pug-type of dog on a lead. About nine inches long. Another man came by in the opposite direction with an equally small something else on a lead. The fluffy pug thing set up a furious barking (although in its case there should be a better word) and but for the constraining lead would have attempted a vicious assault.

'Gatsby!' reproved his man, pulling him away.

Gatsby??