Be careful if you're offered a hottie to warm the bed What's most interesting about this story is that the sky has failed to fall in. A few years ago, Mrs Walker would have been accused of cultural discrimination - of imposing arbitrary standards of "proper" English on her poor charges. Of course, the idea of RP was always something of a fraud: if you listen to recordings of Gladstone, his tones are pure Scouse (and we learnt this week that Richard III may have plotted his villainy in a Brummie twang). But so thoroughly has the mood turned against the Queen's English that Joan Bakewell is, as she wrote here last year, seen as too posh for the BBC - this after she lost her Stockport accent half a century ago because it was considered too common. Still, I can't help feeling a slight pang any time anyone - even for the best of reasons - untangles a linguistic thicket. These days, people write whole books about words that are unfamiliar because they're obscure, or forgotten, or simply foreign (my latest favourite is the German Drachenfutter, or "dragon fodder," meaning the gift a miscreant husband brings home to appease an angry wife). We go giddy when we learn about the strange grammatical rules used by distant tribes, such as the Guugu Yimithirr of Australia, whose sense of direction is so rigidly geographical that they say "the west side of the north table" rather than "the left of the table behind you." Once, every area had its own store of weird little words. Many still do. In Lancashire, moaners mither away - the worst might even be called mardy in Yorkshire. In this weather, those in Shropshire will urge you not to be nesh, and to brave the cold. True, all you'd see in the Lake District would be mizzle (mist and drizzle, now immortalised as a Farrow & Ball colour). But if it's Bally-Ann day (24 hours till payday), that could be all the entertainment you can afford. Sometimes such dialect can simply be confusing. If someone from Gloucestershire asks you to watch the chuggypigs (woodlice), you won't know what to make of it. Likewise, if someone offers a "hottie" to warm your bed, do check whether it's a rubber water bottle (the Highlands) or an attractive young gentleman (California). Words also change meaning: "gallus" is an insult in Glasgow, but during a friend's childhood in Stirling, it was the highest compliment in the playground. All this matters, and for more than just sentimental reasons. It is thought that every two weeks, somewhere in the world, a language dies, steamrollered by the global tongues such as Mandarin, Spanish or English. Dialects, too, are increasingly under threat. As Wittgenstein said, "the limits of my world are the limits of my language" - so what a boring old place it would be if we all spoke the same.