He is seeking to ban it from being used at the beginning of a sentence

The Today programme presenter declared war on the use of the word 'so'

John Humphrys is seeking to ban the word ‘so’ from being used at the beginning of a sentence, branding it ‘irritating’, ‘absurd’ and a ‘noxious weed’ that has invaded everyday speech

With the task of informing the nation from his seat on the Today programme, John Humphrys’ language has reason to be precise.

It may therefore be little surprise that the Radio 4 presenter, 71, is determined to hold the rest of the population to the same exacting standards.

He is seeking to ban the word ‘so’ from being used at the beginning of a sentence, branding it ‘irritating’, ‘absurd’ and a ‘noxious weed’ that has invaded everyday speech.

Writing in his column in Waitrose Weekend magazine, he said: ‘So I am beginning this sentence with a word that is so irritating when it’s used at the start of a sentence that I would understand if you were to rip out this column, screw it into a tight ball and hurl it at the radio the next time you hear my voice coming from it.

'But better to horde your anger and unleash it against the growing band of linguistic vandals, who use this absurd construction routinely – especially when they are asked a question’.

He blamed the rise of ‘so’ on bumbling academics who use it ‘perhaps to buy a bit of time when they’re not quite sure how to answer the question’. However, he lamented that: ‘Now the misplaced “so” has invaded everyday speech like some noxious weed in an untended garden’.

Mr Humphrys has earned a reputation for being a pedant when it comes to the use of English. Last year, he threw down a gauntlet to fellow broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, 75, accusing him of ‘speaking like newspaper headlines’ in history show In Our Time.

On Radio 4 show Broadcasting House he criticised Mr Bragg’s use of the historic present tense, claiming: ‘It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy; it is irritating, it is pretentious’.

In 2007, he was left irate when the Oxford English Dictionary removed the hyphen from 16,000 words. He blamed in on ‘the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago. They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped’.

However, it must be noted that in the article where he complains about this lack of hyphenation, Mr Humphrys is himself guilty of beginning sentences with the word ‘so’.

Mr Humphrys, who presents the Today programme, has earned a reputation for being a pedant when it comes to the use of English

Then there was the occasion when he declared in his book, Beyond Words: How Language Reveals the Way We Live Now, that: ‘Word by word, we are at risk of dragging our language down to the lowest common denominator and we do so at the cost of its most precious qualities: subtlety and precision. If we’re happy to let our common public language be used in this way, communication will be reduced to a narrow range of basic meanings’.

At least in his latest campaign, he is mildly hopeful of success, buoyed by the support of his Today listeners. He writes: ‘My Today mailbox suggests that the fight-back has begun. Angry listeners are demanding that something must be done. Chesterton might have had other matters in mind in his rousing poem The Secret People, but let those corrupters of language take heed of what he wrote: “We are the people of England and we have not spoken yet”’.