There was a letter last week in the Daily Telegraph from C.J. Fletcher, of Stanton St John (a delightful village in which I spent the first two, very happy years of my four-decade stint on The Oxford Times). He (if he he be) wrote: “This morning I heard the phrase, ‘Don’t Christmas too early.’ The sentiment is admirable. The grammar regrettable.”

I can’t have been the only reader to have noticed the regrettable grammar in this missive (well, perhaps I was because, in a week of follow-up letters, there has been no mention of it). The flaw is in the last three words which, though they begin with a capital letter and end with a full stop, do not constitute a sentence.

Yes, I realise that Mr Fletcher would argue that his words are grammatically sound because of an understood ‘is’. He might also say that making a sentence of the words lends them extra emphasis. The effect for me, nevertheless, remains jarring. It would be much better to have a comma rather than a full stop after ‘admirable’. And, talking of commas, why that superfluous one after ‘phrase’?

Apologies for this pedantry, but as Mr Fletcher’s namesake (initials-sake?) might have said: “I didn’t get where I am today without a little pedantry.”

Those amused by names might have noted that Mr Fletcher shared the Torygraph letters page with one Sir Oscar De Ville, of Sonning-on-Thames. I do hope that his wife is not called Cruella. And that she doesn’t keep dogs (which I consider to be an excusable non-sentence).