Dear Future Gamer,

Regarding this swearing thing, this boy (Patrick Allen Gannon) has not been around. Especially not in my part of town. People swear, it's a fact of life, if people didn't swear then the words wouldn't be in the dictionary. So let's look at swearing, 'cos even words like 'damn' and 'hell' are considered to be going too far by some people.

If Patrick believes that having swear words in print is the sign of a 'flagitious, nefarious, insipid, pathetic excuse for an editor' well then he should probably check his grammar, and in all possibility his dictionary. A nefarious act is something deemed criminal, which swearing is not - to swear is to exercise freedom of speech and expression within any country that calls itself a democracy.

While certain words can be considered offensive by some they are merely words, for instance, the disputed word f*** actually means sexual intercourse, s*** means excrement - I could go on. For me the worst language heard is from the so-called 'moral majority' who seek to censor what we can say and, at times, think.

I would bet that even under the angelic guidance of James Binns a fair bit of shouting and swearing went on in the PC Format office, with some of it coming from him.

However the sentence I take the most offence at is the one that describes you as an 'unintelligent, irrelevant little man'. While I'm unsure of your stature, I'd wager you're fairly intelligent (went to editors school and all that), but irrelevant? Does he even know the meaning of the word? Evidently not, if someone is truly irrelevant then nobody pays them any attention. He has constructed a tautology quite effectively by that sentence.

David Rapp

FG: Love that word tautology (the use of words that merely repeat elements of the meaning already conveyed). Anyway, the response Patrick has generated leads me to believe we're on the right track when it comes to allowing the odd expletive in our articles. Common sense has prevailed.