We seem to be having difficulties again with inexplicable age restrictions on buying The Times. A Lancashire reader wrote recently: “Last Saturday our 17-year-old daughter (who incidentally looks older) attempted to buy The Times, as she often does. Included in the newspaper was a DVD with a 12 certification. A sales assistant asked her how old she was and when she answered ‘17' he asked her for identification. She didn't have any, and he refused to sell the newspaper to her.

“The media might worry about the freedom of the press, but perhaps we should worry about our freedom to buy the press! She left the store and bought The Times across the road. Today, it happened again, and there is no DVD or anything extra, just the usual Saturday paper. She bought it in a supermarket after producing documentation - her provisional driving licence - which the assistant scrutinised for an embarrassing amount of time. What will she need next week to buy a paper - her passport, a sample of DNA, or will she have to be accompanied by an adult? Why do we need proof of age to buy a paper?”

When we give away a DVD with a 15 or above age restriction, we are obliged to warn retailers that if they sell copies to customers below that age they could face legal action. The barcode is adapted to flag the restriction on the cashier's screen and on the receipt, advising them to ask for proof of age.

Sometimes, by mistake, that same barcode is applied to the following week's newspapers, leading to the above embarrassment. As soon as any such failing comes to the ears of our distribution department it gets in touch with the retailer as quickly as possible to remedy it; in the meantime, we can only apologise.

Theory of relativity

John Green writes from Carmarthen: “I've noticed an increasing use of ‘that' and ‘which' to refer to people, eg, ‘the players that represented England at Wembley'. That's not acceptable yet, is it?”

The choice between “that”, “who” or “which” as relative pronouns is far from clear-cut, as usual with English. The new edition of Fowler accepts that there are no rules, and that “that” has been used “down the centuries” with a human antecedent.

It quotes Fowler himself from 1926: “The relations between that, who and which have come to us from our forefathers as an odd jumble, and plainly show that the language has not been neatly constructed by a master builder who could create each part to do the exact work required of it, neither overlapped nor overlapping; far from it, its parts have had to grow as they could.”

But from the 20th century onwards it has certainly become customary to use “who” after a human antecedent, and “that” or “which” after an inanimate antecedent.

Two penn'orth

Ken Batten e-mails on a matter that stirs others too from time to time: “If the language is not a lost cause, may I put in my two pennyworth? Can we hear it for the words ‘penny' and ‘pence'? A quick look at a coin is all that is needed to see what it is called, so how have we arrived at ‘one pee' and, worst of all, ‘one pence'? Is there another nation in the entire world so sloppy as to refer to its coinage by its initial letter - I haven't heard of ‘cees' from the Americans, or from European countries which have had cents for long enough. We've lost ‘bobs' and tanners', but we can still have a bit of regard for the history of our coinage, using penny, pennies or pence (as a plural).”

Choppy waters

Roy Munden e-mails from Somerset: “Why do most (but not all) Times writers use the awful expression ‘buoyed up'? Why the redundant ‘up'? Have they or you ever heard of anyone or anything being buoyed down? Magnus Linklater (October 15) could have written ‘an independent Scotland, buoyed by North Sea oil', and the headline for the article immediately below would read better ‘Bullish Brown buoyed for his Border skirmish'. Twice on one page has finally spurred me into complaining.”

And John Sampson, of Oxfordshire, (and others) noted a caption reference to “the HMS Northumberland” on an Opinion page that “must have had every mariner past and present choking on their pink gins”. It's the second time in a month we've committed this blunder; our apologies.

Same old mistake

If proof were needed that there is nothing new in newspapers, the Times Archive can be disconcertingly reliable in providing it. Last week, spurred by a Feedback item on the charity of Times readers, Rose Wild, the editor of the archive, unearthed the tale of how, in 1887, Times readers saved the Elephant Man, Joseph Merrick, which I related here.

Now, as if we lack new mistakes all of our own making to correct, Rose has taken a masochistic delight in finding out what we have had to apologise for in the past (by entering “erratum” in the archive search field at timesonline.co.uk/archive). How's this, from 1841: “Erratum. - In the article on the Hoo Union in our paper of Saturday, an important typographical error occurred, the word ‘died' being printed for ‘did'. The passage should read thus:- ‘It was a Sunday but neither I nor the child went to church: the child's mother did (not ‘died'), and he was flogged for crying after her.” Somehow I feel so much better now.

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