Being a perfectionist can be a genuine curse – not that perfection will ever be within my grasp. But whatever I write I always find severely wanting and can’t resist tinkering with. I have thus completely revised not one but two books, the second being An Alien in a Madhouse, which has now become a much shorter Who’s Put Rat Into Bureaucrat?

Like its predecessor, the book pokes fun at officialdom, officialese, political correctness gone mad and the vagaries of office life. It also ponders some of the usage booby-traps strewn across English, detonating a few of them with irreverent jocularity. This is why the book can also be seen as a reference source addressing several troublesome points of grammar, punctuation and spelling – albeit humorously. And it is a short extract from this book that is given in the next post, its subject being tautology – a very common stylistic lapse.

The reason why it’s posted separately is the text’s categorical refusal to fit underneath this introduction – don’t ask me why!