You write Mallorca, I write Majorca, let’s call the whole thing off. If only the politics, culture and finessing (oh, very well, pedantry) of place names were so easy.

At The Times, we have a tendency not to go native.

Foreign locations that have a long association with the buccaneering salty Brits and their natural heirs and successors, the sunburnt holidaymaking classes doing their impression of grilled prawns, often have anglicised variants.

Hence our Style Guide, of which I am honoured and humbled to be the official custodian, prescribes “Majorca” for the major Balearic island, and Minorca rather than Menorca for its smaller sister.

Mallorca v Majorca: which is correct?

The islanders are campaigning to stop people taking the L out of Mallorca. It's a position I sympathise with

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• Mallorca v Majorca: which is correct?

And talking of family rivalries, The Sunday Times has a different approach. It is, after all, a different newspaper.

It opts for the –ll- form (pronounced approximately like an English “y”), perhaps less redolent of 1970s imagery and thus instantly pleasing to the island’s tourism powers that be.

Observant readers of our hybrid Times Online website, like archaeologists poring over the fine detail of Roman remains in Maiorca (Latin), Majorca or Mallorca at Pollentia (oh sorry, Pollèntia in Catalan, note accent), may discern which pieces have their provenance in the daily or Sunday organ.

So, you might ask, why is The Times so cussed awkward and imposing the values of the long-gone colonialist hyenas on the world of 2009?

Or you could wonder why The Sunday Times is sucking up to politically correct localism.

Or, more sensibly, you may conclude that there is less right and wrong in these matters, and rather a hundred more shades of grey than ever were used to portray John Major in Spitting Image.

The trick is to try to know who your readers are and then to guess what they best understand. This amalgam of science and art is always easy for critics to attack and misrepresent.

Whenever I get an e-mail from one of the go-native brigade, demanding that “surely you should not be writing Madras”, I reply that my favourite eating establishments in Southall appear in no rush to revise their menus to serve me lamb Chennai.

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