Words: Paedophile, n.

IF EVERY criminal wants to be caught, then Gary Glitter's forbidding a PC World engineer to open his lap-top files was tantamount to making him click on the mouse forthwith. An unremarked aspect of the case is that nobody will now have a machine repaired but, instead, buy a new, faster one for less.

Meanwhile, we have the word paedophile, but not one for a love of children - which, from the Greek, is in fact what it should mean, just as an audiophile relishes hi-fi rather than smashes it up. Some parents loathe children; some of the childless - such as Virginia Woolf - are magical with them.

Paedophile was Havelock Ellis's 1906 coining. Does any other word that ends in -phile mean a perversion? Some might suggest Europhile.