It's only words

For anoraks only.

If you care to click on this link, and then on First Minister's Questions (the frst item on the list of items), you can view yesterday's FMQs in all its tawdry glory. If you do so, you will see that Ms Alexander has yet to come to grips with the parliamentary convention that when, referring to other members in the chamber, you do so in the third person. In other words, if you are Ms Alexander, you address your remarks to the Presiding Officer and refer to the First Minister as the First Minister or 'he', rather than 'you'. Although Ms Alexander starts off correctly, there are at least five occasions during FMQs when she slips into addressing the First Minister directly (twice in her first supplementary, twice in her second supplementary and once in her fourth supplementary). One would have thought that, by this time, she would have learned to get the matter right but that is not my main point.

If you click on this link, you can read the official (written) report of the session. Intriguingly, all of Ms Alexander's slips and errors have been corrected, so that the text now reads as if her questioning was properly addressed in its entirety. So the official report, the official record of what was said in parliament, is not always wholly accurate.

Does it matter? Probably not. Nobody minds the correction of the odd linguistic mistake, provided it does not alter the meaning of what was said. But whoever is transcribing the official record needs to be careful ...