ALMOST all calls are welcome; almost none is newsworthy. Last wintry Wednesday someone rang to report that it was starvation out there - new meaning, perhaps, to cold calling.

Use of the word "starvation" to mean cold - as in "Why man, aa'm half starved to death" - is familiar in the North. Surprisingly, it's by no means unique to the region.

As well as its more widespread uses, the Oxford defines "starvation" both as "very cold" (dialect and colloquial) and "deprivation of essential supply of something necessary to life." The two may tautologically be linked, as in "perishing".

The verb "starve" is additionally defined as "to die of exposure, chiefly used hyperbolically; to be benumbed with cold".

These days, adds the Oxford by way of freezing point, "starve" in that sense is only found in the North. We knew it was cold up here.

Last week's column, not entirely coincidentally, pondered the phrase "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." The most popular theory had it that a brass monkey was a triangular frame used to store cannon balls on sailing ships. When the brass froze, the balls scattered.

Bill Taylor, once in Bishop Auckland and now in Canada, is among those who doesn't give a monkey's - a monkey's what, for heaven's sake, what's that one all about? - for the notion. A website puts it suitably coldly.

"The coefficient of expansion of brass is 0.00001, that of iron 0.000012. If the base of the stack were one metre long, the drop in temperature needed to make a "monkey" shrink by a millimetre relative to the balls would be around 100 degrees Celsius.

"It is hardly credible...In any case, in weather like that, the sailors would probably have better things to think about."

Fulsome" means "nauseous" or "offensive", not the opposite - usually misused in phrases like "fulsome praise". On every occasion in the last ten years on which it has been employed in The Northern Echo and Darlington & Stockton Times, it has appeared under false pretences.

Last week's column was full of it. Was it the most wrongly used word in the English language, we wondered, prompting a note from Les Wilson in Guisborough who in 1986 wrote a letter to one of the papers demanding a fulsome apology.

Then he looked it up. Apologies have simply been full thereafter.

Dave Dye in Wolsingham offers several cap-in-hand candidates - "celibate" when "chaste" is meant, "crescendo" instead of "peak" - but settles on "decimate", which means to take away a tenth part and not, tithes that bind, something altogether more damaging.

"I once knew a bloke who used the word "homogenuous, whenever possible," adds Dave, "but he was just a clever bugger."

MAUREEN Atack, who lives in Leeds and has the Echo delivered daily - "we love it," she says - proposes "fortuitous" when "fortunate" is intended. "It makes my hair stand on end," she says; fortuitous means happening by chance.

John Smith in Shildon understandably nominates "absolutely" The word, he says, is used constantly by people being interviewed on television. "It appears to mean 'yes'.

"The world is going to run out of superlatives if we are always reaching for the 'absolute' in our simplest pronouncements."

Describing herself as a fully paid-up pedant, Gill Wootten in Darlington tackles the merry issue of "may", when might is right.

The standard advice concerns lifejackets: "His lifejacket may have saved him" means that he is alive, possibly because of his lifejacket.

"A lifejacket might have saved him" means that he's dead, and wasn't wearing one.

THOUGH he claims "fulsome" as his starting point, Brian Anderson in Dalton, Thirsk, invites consideration of the word "vowed". A promisory note, as it were.

"It's a favourite of sports journalists, but I've never heard it anywhere else except at a wedding service," he says. "How often has it been used in the Echo and D&S Times in the last ten years?"

In the last four years it's appeared on 1,761 occasions, only six of the last 25 instances in sports stories - Darlington FC manager David Hodgson vowing in three of them.

It's not that everyone goes around vowing their heads off, of course, only that we journalists say they do. Just take the column's word for it.

IT'S the season of lights fantastic, an early contender for Ho-Ho-Home of the year - were there to be an award - an extraordinarily arrayed house and garden on Stanhope's eastern approach.

When it comes to decking the halls, however, nothing is going to compete with the municipal merrymaking at Ferryhill.

The front of the town hall is festooned almost from top to bottom with electric blue (or some such) lights, the pathway to the front door similarly adorned. The old soldier on the war memorial looks on stony faced.

Ferryhill folk may be dazzled or dumbfounded, according to taste. As ever hanging round for a bus, the column was suitably illuminated.

ASKING anonymity, a Teesside reader sends a cutting from The Independent about a victory for women's lib at Scarborough Conservative Club.

It was the club which in 1988 politely refused to let Margaret Thatcher into the downstairs bar, on the grounds that it had been men only since 1889.

"She saw off us steelworkers, the shipyard workers and Scargill," says our correspondent, "but she couldn't get the better of Scarborough Conservative Club and its doorkeeper."

They've now given in or, as one of the women cheerfully puts it, been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Whether the same open minded approach applies to our friends at Coundon Conservative Club, we are unfortunately able to say. For daring in the early 1970s to suggest that not every member might have been a card carrying member of the Edward Heath fan club, we remain debarred to this day.

WHAT goes around comes around, last week's column also touched upon push ball. In the 1930s, says Bob Harbron, the highlight of Hartlepool Old Carnival was the push ball contest between Townsmen and Fishermen, though everyone else got involved, too.

The ball was a proper casey, about eight feet in diameter. The aim was to push it off the north or south end of the town moor. "Today's footballers would be stretched out," says Bob, "if they had to head a wet and muddy casey."

A bit down the coast, several readers have kindly pointed out that the Vale of Avoca - after which a 19th century pub in Middlesbrough's dockland was lustrously named - is a river and valley in Co Wicklow. The village of Avoca is where the television series Ballykissangel was filmed.

So ends another column. More starvation rations next week.

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