I TRY to be a stickler when it comes to the English language, while accepting that it must always be allowed to evolve.

Making up new words is a good way of doing this. That’s why I offer the word ‘quaintirky’ for your delectation this week. It is an amalgamation of quaint and quirky, which my weekly wormlike slither through life’s vicissitudes occasionally attempts to be.

This week’s quaintirkyness concerns both the past and the future.

I have oft times in this column referred to my formative years as a young reporter - the days when newsrooms echoed with the clatter of Imperial typewriter keys and you could hide from the editor behind a smokescreen provided courtesy of a trusty pack of Embassy Regals.

Today, I sometimes regale my young Gazette colleagues with tales from that pre-computer age when sub-editors brandished their red pens as if preparing to fight a duel. They would figuratively slap a glove in our faces over typos and literals and other miscellaneous transgressions, invariably to do with sloppy prose and our tendency to split infinitives with as much enthusiasm as Rutherford had for splitting the atom.

But this week I got to thinking what sort of recollections my young colleagues will have - and, perhaps more to the point, whether at the fag end of their careers, like I am now, they will lament the old ways and complain about the new.

I’m particularly curious to know where technology will leave the journalistic profession in 30 or 40 years?

Well, there probably won’t be printed newspapers - and maybe not even electronic ones. Perhaps all news will be communicated via sophisticated journalistic thought processes.

I can just imagine the newsroom chat.

“I’ve just succeeded in hacking into the Prime Minister’s brain.”

“Oh yes. What’s he thinking.”

“He wants to curb the powers of we Cognicenti, so I corrupted his data input configuration.”