Words: coffin, n.

ANOTHER NEWSPAPER'S corrections column has alerted readers that they might have been misled by a report that "the left-arm spinner ricked his back lifting his coffin out of the car". This was not some prescient bargain, a new line from Homebase, but recent slang among Australian and English cricketers for a cricket-bag taken on tour - not yet in any dictionary, nor in G. A. Wilkes's boggling Australian Colloquialisms.

Without exhausting the word, one could say the coffin dropped the coffin on his coffin: it can mean clumsy fellow and foot. It came in the 16th century, via Old French for little basket from Latin and Greek, and can also mean a horse's hoof, printing frame, pie crust and - as a harbinger of death - a coal that leaps from the fire.