It’s taken a couple of days for me to calm down sufficiently to write this. But I saw the word ‘etc’ in the <em>Times</em> the other day, honest. It was in the first ‘<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/article7146271.ece" target="_blank">column’</a> written by their new World Cup ‘columnist’ the ‘comic’ James Corden, who I think appears on the telly or something and is one of the new generation of ‘celebrities’. Like most columns these days the subject is, of course, not the ostensible one, football, but principally the writer himself, in this case discussing how that TV classic <em>Gavin &amp; Stacey </em>seems destined to dog him for life.<em>&nbsp;</em>

I shrieked, of course. About the use of ‘etc’ more than anything. Shrieked so loudly the dog went into hiding and only came out four hours later after a tempting offer of biscuits.

Etc? In the <em>Times? </em>I tell you if that paywall had been up and I’d forked out cash to see this monstrosity even biscuits wouldn’t have got that dog out.

Let me&nbsp; plead with you: except in extraordinary circumstances never use such a nasty little excuse for a word. Here’s why.

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Perhaps the easiest way to explain is to give you an example of correct usage. It’s in <em>The King and I</em> where Yul Brynner expresses the pomposity and seeming ignorance of the monarch by declaring, ‘Et cetera, et cetera…’ at the end of every sentence he couldn’t be bothered to finish.

This was the habit of the real king, as recorded in the supposedly biographical&nbsp; <em>Anna and the King of Siam</em>, a book the Thais hate with a vengeance and say is utter fiction. In the musical this arrogant and comical habit is used to point up the king’s character. Whether <em>Anna and the King of Siam</em> carries a shred of truth or not, it’s certainly accurate to associate the term with monarchs.

Nicholas II of Russia’s official title was ‘Nicholas II, By the Grace of God, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, King of Poland, Grand Duke of Finland, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera’. When you had that many dominions, you see, it got tiresome to list them all.

There’s a clue to the wastrel nature of this word in its loose spelling. It can be written in full as ‘et cetera’ or ‘etcetera’, shortened to ‘etc’ or even – shudder – ‘&amp;c’. Real words generally have only one spelling. It’s Latin in origin, naturally, and simply means ‘and the rest.’

Unless you’re a monarch with so many dominions you can’t be bothered to list them ‘etc’ should always be avoided in journalism, fiction and most non-fiction too. Words are supposed to signify something. This signifies nothing. All it indicates is that the writer is too bone idle to spell out the items that the ‘etc’ stands for.

Why? If they’re important, take the time to write them. If they’re not, they don’t need mentioning in the first place.

The use of ‘etc’ is, ninety nine times out of a hundred, an indication of nothing more than laziness on the part of the writer, and laziness in writing deserves to be called out, always. Had someone submitted copy containing the word ‘etc’ when I was a writer on the <em>Times</em> back in the 1980s the newsroom would have immediately resembled one of those <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._M._Bateman" target="_blank">Bateman cartoons</a>, full of shrieking hacks astonished and hurt any of their peers could wish to commit such an injury to the much-loved person of the Thunderer.

Someone should have a word with the equally idle sub-editor who allowed this dread monster into a serious national newspaper. Given how much ‘celebrity columnists’ cost these days, and how much the <em>Times </em>is losing, Rupert deserves more for his money than this.