I was there when it happened. I saw it, I heard it...and I am still hearing it hours afterwards. The sound of over-revving engines, smoking tyres, squealing brakes, desperate steering, and then the elongated eerie silence that everyone notices moments before something awful. That expired, then came the grinding, clashing roar of two adjectives crashing head-first into each other. God, there was debris everywhere, mangled, broken letters crawling from the wreckage, dazed and confused. Like me, and I was just a bystander.

It was so bad, I expected nothing to survive, yet something did, but it was nothing I'd ever seen before, slowly, struggling for support, there it was a new word... stratical. Out of the grey smoke came this pig in a poke, fused from the remains of two sturdy adjectives: strategic and tactical. It's the midpoint term: when it's not part of an over-arching programme with date way into the future i.e. strategic, but more important than expedient, or needs doing now i.e. tactical. Or if it's easier, think of a timeline: tactical, tomorrow; stratical, next week; strategic next month.

I heard it this afternoon and in a serious conversation. It's not a word, it's a car-crash. Stratical, it sounds like a condition I should be suffering from, the footnote to a very lengthy piece in a medical encyclopedia: " extreme sufferers are known to experience intense and prolonged stratical episodes..." We've got to ring-fence it and keep it out of common parlance. I love an ever refreshing English language, but some candidates, you have to say thank you, but try again later. Stratical has to be one of those. I dare n't run it through Google, it may be true.