As one who wrote very recently of ‘religious piety’ — arresting the tautology only seconds before it sailed into print (ah, those seizable wave-borne bloopers!) — I am perhaps not the best person to be discussing the syntactical sin of saying the same thing twice. And yes, in the first deliberate ‘mistake’ in this column, I acknowledge that ‘very’ is possibly an unnecessary qualification for the adverb ‘recently’, since a close proximity to the present is already stated (as is closeness, of course, in the word ‘proximity’).

I acknowledge, too — in an untypically self-lacerating mood — that my first use of inverted commas in the paragraph above, those containing the word ‘mistake’ (there I go again!) are almost certainly a lapse from stylistic good taste. The matter is put very well in Plain Words, Sir Ernest Gowers’s guide to the use of English, as updated in a new edition (Particular Books, £14.99) by his great-granddaughter Rebecca Gowers.

He/she writes that such a use possibly arises through a writer’s being too lazy to look for the right word. “‘I know that this is not quite the right word’, the inverted commas seem to say, ‘but I can’t be bothered to think of one that is better’; or ‘please note that I am using this word facetiously’; or ‘don’t think I don’t know that this is a cliché’. If the word is the right one, do not be ashamed of it. If it is the wrong one, do not use it.”

I fancy that Sir Ernest and/or his great-granddaughter . . . Oh heavens, there I go again, ‘and/or’ being two words (‘he/she’ may be two more) that our arbiters of style strongly disapprove of (let’s not bother our heads at present — if at all — with the advisability of ending a sentence with a preposition which, thanks to this handy parenthesis, I now haven’t).

“Avoid . . . that ugly and unnecessary symbol and/or,” the guide states (cleverly avoiding inverted commas through the use of those italics), “when writing letters. It is fit only for forms and lists and specifications and things of that sort [to express an idea with two more ‘ands’ — or should that be ‘and’s? — and two less commas than I consider ideal]. It can always be dispensed with. Instead of writing (say) ‘soldiers and/or sailors’ we can write soldiers or sailors or both’.”

My eagle-eyed readers (are there others?) will have noticed a blatant error in the foregoing paragraph when I wrote ‘less commas’ instead of ‘fewer’. Oliver Kamm recently claimed in his Times column called The Pedant — not recommended reading for anyone who is one — that the insistence on ‘fewer’ for number was a shibboleth of recent invention and should be ignored. This seemed an absurd argument. ‘Fewer’ is what educated people say; anyone saying ‘less’ risks being thought ignorant.

Wilfred Whitten and Frank Whitaker put the matter concisely in their 1950 book Good and Bad English: “Less applies to degree, quantity or extent; fewer to number. Thus, less outlay, fewer expenses; less help, fewer helpers; less milk, fewer eggs. But although ‘few’ applies to number do not join it to the word itself: ‘a fewer number’ is incorrect; say ‘a smaller number.’ Less takes a singular noun, ‘fewer’ a plural noun [could not ‘noun’ have been understood?]; thus, ‘less opportunity,’ ‘fewer opportunities.’”

The punctuation is exactly as above, incidentally, with inverted commas placed after the punctuation marks. Plain Words refers to the variation in this matter but fails to note that the ‘after’ option is principally favoured in the United States.

Finally (and not before time, you might think) I shall turn to tautology, as alluded to in my opening paragraph. Ms Gowers (for great-grandpappy would not have been around to hear it over a Tube train Tannoy) deprecates those ‘personal possessions’ which we must not leave behind when alighting (one never, of course, gets off public transport). My instance was noted in the Daily Telegraph’s caption to the picture of a ridiculously kilted Prince of Wales where His Royal Highness was said to have visited a caravan park “to see first hand” how a charity had helped transform it.

Why not simply ‘see’? Royal personages, I have noticed, always see ‘first hand’ or ‘for themselves’. I suppose we are expected to marvel at the fact that here, for once, is something not being done for them by others.