Almost every day in the news pages of The Times you’ll read the phrase “who cannot be named for legal reasons”, and Ray Bolt wants to know more about it. “In most cases it looks as though the subjects are under reporting age, or are there other reasons?” he asks. “Is there a legal reason why we can’t be told the legal reason?”

My grammar-school O-level law course, of which all I can now recall is Mrs Carlill and the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company, seemed inadequate here, so I sought a more learned response from Alastair Brett, our chief legal eagle.

“There can be many legal reasons why courts impose reporting restriction orders preventing identification of victims or witnesses. Sections 39 and 49 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, as amended, prevent juveniles in any criminal court being identified. Section 49 imposes automatic anonymity in youth courts, but the court can lift the ban. Section 39 gives the judge in any criminal court the ability to impose anonymity. There are myriad ‘legal reasons’ why people will not be identified: rape victims cannot be named under the Sexual Offences (Amendment) Act 1976, and Section 11 of the Contempt of Court Act gives the court the power to prevent witnesses or even parties to proceedings being named. While family courts can now be reported in general terms — something The Times fought hard for — parties cannot be identified.

“Blackmail victims cannot be named and, in any official secrets case, witnesses and even parties may only be known by initials. Finally, the law of contempt may prevent someone being named because they may face separate charges in a different court, and identification would be prejudicial to a fair second trial. Because the reasons are so varied, the media use the blanket term.” We rest our case.

Robin unreliable It must be Christmas. Derek Hunt e-mails: “Times2 on Tuesday considered the alternatives to Christmas cards. It said: ‘ . . . and there’s the round robin from the family you met in Rhodes in 2003, describing in detail their son’s clarinet exams’. I was under the impression that a round robin was a petition or protest, having the signatures in a circle in order to disguise the order of signing or, more commonly, any letter or petition signed by a number of people. Did your writer mean a circular letter?”

Every year at about this time we start to mention round robins, and every year a handful of readers pick us up on it. Strictly speaking, Mr Hunt is quite correct, of course. However, this misusage is now so widespread that I doubt we can, or even should, turn back the tide.

Cross-cultural Let’s hear it for the Anglo-Saxons.

D. A. Edmondson writes from Yorkshire: “Last Saturday’s Great British Weekend article featured the ‘8th-century Celtic cross’ at Eyam, Derbyshire. Together with others at Sandbach in Cheshire, Bewcastle in Cumbria and Ruthwell near Dumfries, Eyam’s is in fact one of our many surviving Anglo-Saxon carved stone crosses. A minor quibble, I know, but nothing is so minor that accuracy does not matter.

“In the same issue Adam Sage reported on French eating habits and did indeed use Anglo-Saxon — in ‘Anglo-Saxon TV dinners’. This form of shorthand seems, unfortunately, to be creeping in more and more. But as a label for the habit of eating meals in front of the telly? Come on!

“The Anglo-Saxons left the Lindisfarne Gospels, the works of Bede, the foundations of the English language, England itself. Show a bit of pride.”

E-mail tennis That Monday morning feeling was considerably heightened this week when I arrived at my desk to find 3,713 e-mails in the Feedback folder. Turns out that just after I logged off on Friday evening a wretched Italian spam e-mail landed, which then elicited the Feedback auto-acknowledgement, which then elicited the Italian spammer’s auto-acknowledgement, and the two auto-acks spent the entire weekend merrily pinging back and forth across Western Europe at a rate of knots.

The only solution was to switch off my auto-ack for several hours until his ardour cooled. Which is a very long-winded way of apologising if you e-mailed earlier in the week and got nothing back. Normal service has been resumed — until the next time.

Exotic exit The save-our-single-context-words campaign seems to be evolving into a game of spot-the-lexical-rarity. My reference last week to the pleasure I derive from a sign near our office reading “Egress” elicited from many of you slightly different versions of the same tale. As he was one of the first in, I’ll let John Burscough do the honours: “The sign reminded me of the American showman P. T. Barnum. On St Patrick’s Day, 1843, with the crowds jamming his American Museum showing no intention of leaving and ticket sales stalled, he had a notice nailed up reading ‘To The Egress’.

“Thrill-seekers following it down the back stairs expecting to find an exotic creature found themselves out on the street.” As Barnum said, there’s a sucker born every minute.

And look what I spotted in last Saturday’s gardening pages: “Empty clay pots containing spent summer bedding to keep them dryer and less likely to spall in the frost.” Lovely.