Bow to your superior knowledge of physics, Whistle, but I comment as an editor. Many - probably most - users of 'quantum leap' intend to indicate a very large move. They simply DON'T KNOW THE MEANING OF THE WORDS THEY USE. As I think the other examples I've given demonstrate. Sorry for shouting, I just get a little het up sometimes.

There is no such word as furtherest. Look it up in the dictionary if you don’t believe me. It’s like saying braverest or strongerest.

People use this made up word all the time. Try farthest, furthest or longest.

Why have remedial courses for illiterate teachers, Tubley? I'm sure plenty of people would happily volunteer to be part of the firing squad, providing a considerable incentive to maintain high standards. Not that any desire for revenge on the nuns from all those years ago colours my attitudes at all, you understand.

With you all the way, anomie.

The proponents of "it's a living language" school are the foot soldiers of evil in the war against precision and correctness in English usage. What they fail to understand is that when a word is misused to the point where its meaning is either changed or - more likely - debased in some way, we lose a valuable element of clarity in communication. We should mourn the passing of each individual word.

Sure, my audience might "know" what I mean when they hear the phrase "quantum leap", but they are in fact misled as to its true meaning. The fact that they don't even care that they are misusing the word "quantum" only compounds the fault.

Sadly, the cause is laziness, and if the living language school are foot soldiers, our newspapers are the standard-bearers. Every day, every single issue of every single newspaper published in Australia contains at least one outright verbal solecism; more often a solid crop of them.

(Whatever happened to the profession of sub-editor? Gone, probably; replaced by computer spell checkers.)

It is particularly unfortunate that the starting proposition in this article - the suffix -ize - was so wrongheaded. We need more, not fewer, of these complaints about the dumbing-down of one of our key resources - not to mention the source of a great deal of our international competitiveness - the English language.