Keith Skipper ponders some of life's little mysteries... such as why we put up with trendybabble.

I turned in early the other evening to ponder a few of life's little mysteries. Such as: is champagne the wrath of grapes? What happened to the First Mohican? If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? Is writer's block just numb de plume?

Sleep arrived well before any sensible answers but at least I had been spared one more television programme featuring endless repeats for the Fatuous Five – actually, awesome, fantastic, gobsmacked and gutted.

So many words and expressions to pick from, so little regard for any idea of a linguistic adventure. Now politicians dress up as footballers on a level playing field with banal soundbites the only goal. I call it gabbling in shorts.

Yes, if the English language made any sense, phonetic would start with an f, catastrophe would be an apostrophe with fur and lymph would mean to walk with a lisp. Even so, there's no excuse for many of the abuses it has to suffer.

Perhaps we add to this growing chaos led on by a voracious media. For a start, we watch Parliament elect a Speaker when there are about 650 of them in there already talking a lot of old squit to the Right Horrible Gentleman enjoying a quiet doze opposite.

We call it rush-hour when nothing moves. We know fast food tends to slow us down. We accept that diet is a plan for putting off tomorrow what you put on today. Little wonder rubbish is passed off as reality all too often on our small screens.

It can creep into more homely areas as well. I remember some years back when Cromer Smugglers picked up an 'unsung heroes' award, But that's what they did the whole time – sing! Reckon they mimed thanks for the tribute.

We must take better care of our language before it drowns in a vat of clichés, that's for sure, if you know what I mean, or disappear in a storm of texting, twittering and other types of phoney habits let loose along the information highway.

Norfolk ought to set a good example by not holding a conference on the subject. There's no point in a gathering of keynote speakers who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.

Far better to get back to individual basics and spend an evening in with a good dictionary and a willingness to take liberties in the name of a word revival. I took my cue from comedian and writer Barry Cryer, a master of alternative suggestions. He reckons Honolulu means to give an MBE to a Scottish singer.

Then I stumbled across Dickensian as an adjective used to describe a) snow at Christmas, b) very long novels. Suddenly I remembered a boy at school lighting up a dull English language lesson by announcing his father refused to pay syntax.

That did it. A rustic stalwart emerged from my early newspaper reporting days to describe growing excitement over his local garden show as 'wisteria'. A fashion-conscious colleague in the 1960s assured me 'baloney' was where some hemlines fell.

I owned up to harbouring a belief that 'absentee' is a missing golf peg, 'cardiology' the study of knitwear, 'decanter' to slow down a horse and 'logarithm' a dance for lumberjacks.

A medical source informed me that 'dilate' means to live longer and an 'outpatient' is a person who has fainted. Up popped a dentist to bill 'toothache' as the pain that drives you to extraction. An honest planner admitted 'suburbia' is where they tear out the trees and then name streets after them.

Isn't it so refreshing when we don't all sing from the same song-sheet? When all is said and done at the end of the day, the worst-case scenario is to tell someone you can see where they're coming from with yet another load of positive feedback at this moment in time.

Away with trendybabble! And I'm fed up with smug newsreaders who keep on announcing 'and now it's time for the news where you are'. I have lost count of the number of bulletins without a single mention of north Norfolk in general or Cromer in particular.

I'm ready for another early night. Now, is an archive where Noah kept his bees? Are part-time bandleaders semi-conductors? Do engine drivers eternally wish they were small boys? Does anyone gossip about other people's secret virtues?