Back in the office earlier than expected from my jury service (there being insufficient villains to go round), I discover a flurry of activity at Offplease (for the benefit of newer readers, this is Feedback's department for especially intractable problems, proper name Office Of You Can Please Some Of The People All Of The Time Etc).

Anyone whose memory stretches all the way back to last month will know that until recently we devoted the back two pages of times2 to puzzles. However, in common with all newspapers The Times has - temporarily, we trust - had to reduce pagination in certain areas following the economic downturn. The Editor decided that from Monday October 27 we could devote only one page of T2 to puzzles, but conscious of the popularity of the Su Dokus we tried initially to retain three puzzles daily by reducing their size rather dramatically.

Many, many readers promptly protested, with good reason, that they were too small to read, so after just two days we abandoned the experiment and reluctantly dropped one of the three in order to be able to print them at a legible size, varying as much as possible the difficulty of the two remaining puzzles each day. Whereupon many other readers promptly protested that now they don't always get the one that they like the best out of Easy, Mild, Difficult, Fiendish and Superfiendish.

Meanwhile some readers are pleased to have the T2 crossword back on the back page, but other readers are cross that the Codeword has had to shrink slightly in size. We hope that we've now come up with a workable solution which still gives you every weekday two Su Dokus, one Killer, the T2 crossword, Codeword, Polygon, the T2 Quiz and Wordwatching, all neatly packaged on the T2 back page, plus in the main paper The Workout at the top of the first column of news briefs, Kenken on the Daily Universal Register page in the Opinion section, and the cryptic crossword on the inside back page.

Enough there, I'd have thought, to keep you all nicely distracted from getting on with the day jobs; any more and we'll never get this country back on the rails.

Period piece

A history question from Tim King of Shrewsbury: “I was watching a Channel 4 documentary on the British Empire recently. A copy of The Times from 1857 was shown and I was intrigued to see that ‘The Times' in the masthead was followed by a full stop. When did this practice cease? Present-day English masters would frown upon the inclusion of an irrelevant full stop.”

And, as ever, a history lesson from the Times archivist, Nick Mays: “The full stop was dropped from the masthead in 1920. The best explanation I can offer for its insertion was that the original full title of the paper in the masthead was The Daily Universal Register, Printed Logographically By His Majesty's Patent. The first issue printed solely under the present name (March 18, 1788) was titled The Times. Printed Logographically. When the paper ceased to be printed logographically in 1792 they must have just removed those words, leaving the full stop untouched.”

Capital notion

Alex Galloway writes from Kenilworth: “John Gregory's letter on opera in Manchester (October 30) follows the prevalent habit of spelling Bohème with a small B. Significant words in titles are, by convention, capitalised, as in the letter on the same page that refers to Salman Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh. Why is poor old Bohème so often singled out for this minusculisation?”

The Times follows (when it remembers) their own country's style conventions for French, Italian and Spanish titles (endorsed by the Grove Dictionary of Opera and similar), which are to capitalise only the first word of the title, even if that's just a definite article, and thereafter only any proper nouns, so it would be Pelléas et Mélisande, but La fille mal gardée (Bohemia seemingly not considered to be a proper noun).

Smarter errata

“By the end, as Mr Obama rises to a rhetorical crescendo ... ” (November 1, spotted by Peter Soul, of Reading). “The thrum of activity reached its crescendo ... (October 23, spotted by David Nixon, of Solihull). Times style guide: “Crescendo means getting louder, growing in force. Nothing rises to a crescendo.” Must try harder.

I know we're living longer these days, but Clare Gibson of London was one of several readers surprised by a news item. “On Hallowe'en, how appropriate it was to read that ‘ancestors of the Phoenicians, believed to have been wiped out when Rome destroyed Carthage in 146BC, are still living in Mediterranean regions'. But should they be classified as undead or immortal?”

On the other hand, two to The Times recently: a Reigate reader was appalled by our ignorance in referring to Pekinese dogs (rather than Pekingese), and a London reader was rather rude about our “incorrect” spelling of “judgment” in a headline. Both of these are merely matters of style preference, ladies, not of accuracy; both are in the dictionary.

Still, it could have been worse. A correction from the Times Archive, from March 31, 1841: “Erratum. - In the Philharmonic notice yesterday, 27 lines from the end of the article, for ‘A grand symphony,' which completely spoils the sense, read ‘Not a grand symphony'.”

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