Words: Larder fill, v.

AMONG THE linguistic horrors with which we all contend there arises a particular horror in the Grocer (you see how I suffer on your behalf). Step forward, head bowed, the sales director of Varta batteries, Graham Verity.

He asserts that "multi-packs have protected and grown the grocery share of trade. Consumers are now buying batteries to `larder fill' for future use."

He might say that the quotation marks imply post-modern irony in an age when refrigerators have ousted the larder, but his gruesome "grown", his view of humanity as "consumers" and that tautological "future use" make us infer that he is a man who thinks "larder fill" a smart synonym for hoard or stockpile - unless scorned now, it might make the next edition of that recent vulgar New Oxford Dictionary.