HERE’S a question. What do those wonderful words abstemious and facetious have in common?

Vowels! I hear you cry.

And you’re absolutely spot on.

Vowels is the answer, for both those words contain all of them in the right order - a,e,i,o,u.

What a mine of useless information Tunners is, you must be thinking.

Why on earth can’t he find something more constructive to do with his thoughts, like how to solve the world’s financial woes or end all wars?

Well, the truth is I need occasionally to escape from the world’s vicissitudes; to switch off my mind and think of pleasant things.

And to Tunners, words are pleasant and therapeutic things.

Not that they always have pleasant meanings; but the words themselves can often be more than tools of communication.

Take the word ‘mellifluous’, for example.

What a queen of words that is. Its meaning is more or less how it sounds - smooth and musical.

Not all words achieve this level of integrity, however.

Why isn’t the word ‘phonetic’ spelled like it sounds?

And why is ‘abbreviation’ such a long word?

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Tunners can bore any dinner party to pieces in minutes with such word-centric musings.

The following is my all-time favourite.

Construct, if you can, a grammatical sentence that has five consecutive ‘ands’ in it - ‘and, and, and, and, and’.

The most popular answer is that it’s a sentence spoken by somebody with a stutter.

No, I respond, the person uttering is not stuttering.

Please try harder.

And harder they try until one by one my fellow dinner party attendees all give up and beg the answer.

And here it is: “A man is painting a sign outside the Dog and Duck and the landlord comes out and says to him: ‘I’d like more space, please, between the ‘dog’ and ‘and’ and ‘and’ and ‘duck’!’”