LISTENING to the local news on the Boring Broadcasting Company, it suddenly struck me how much the BBC shapes our everyday language.

Every BBC utterance now seems to be laced with the lexicon of the politically correct.

The news story, which once again confirmed my belief that the BBC is a viper's nest of political correctness gone mad, concerned another pensioner.

This ancient lady had left her "vertical slum" and returning home, the vermin that now infest our streets beat her up, robbed her, and left her bleeding and bruised and broken.

This obscene brutality, perpetrated by a hoodlum who apparently deliberately selects victims, from the old and frail, was then described as "anti-social behaviour" - a nice clean sanitised, and "socially acceptable label," for an act of appalling thuggery by a thug.

Why have we allowed the high priests of political correctness to hijack our language and transform an act of extreme violence into something akin to a social gaff?

Why do we allow the authorities to hide behind this new lexicon of political correctness, which sanitises the obscenity of the widespread thuggery on our streets? Would those now basking in adulation, after the issuing of a handful of Anti Social Behaviour Orders, be beaming expressions of smug satisfaction, if those orders were labelled "Thuggery Orders" - no they would not, because we'd be demanding to know why our violent vermin weren't being locked up.

That is the disgusting difference the use of politically correct language makes to our perception of the social sewer in which we all now live.

N TAYLOR,

Worcester