ACCORDING to the nurse at the doctors’ surgery, my blood pressure is slightly high.

But she assures me there is probably nothing to worry about, especially when I explain about the extenuating circumstances.

Anybody’s blood pressure would be high if they had to walk through the wind and the rain to get to the appointment, and if that wasn’t enough, I had also spotted a glaring misuse of an apostrophe on the journey.

Every crime against the English language makes my blood boil just a little.

I’m afraid I have to blame this paper, because it was when I starting writing for the Advertiser, way back in 1989, that I first got the curse.

I was nearly normal before then.

To be fair, the curse – an obsession with correctness in language – afflicts everybody who works in publishing of any kind, but journalism especially.

It takes many forms, the worst being a preoccupation with punctuation, while the most manageable is grammar, since the absence of any official rules means grammar is much more subjective and often a matter of opinion.

But, as with people (including me) who can’t ignore a dripping tap or resist straightening pictures on the wall, every single abuse of the language sounds klaxons in my head.

Every time somebody says something is “quite unique” or “very unique”, for instance, my blood pressure goes up again – because unique means one-of-a-kind. Something is either unique or not, and never anything in-between.

Until recently I thought my affliction was incurable, but now it seems that working for a national media organisation, where language abuse is rife, would cure me.

BBC News, for instance, have adopted a surprisingly casual and blasé approach to the meaning of words.

Over the last few months they have been keen to feed us headlines about a ‘migrant crisis’, which was all about the mass movement of people into and through Europe.

The ‘crisis’ part of the headline was probably justified as it reflected a sudden increase in numbers that some countries are struggling to cope with, even if the problem is not acute in the UK, compared with other European countries.

But the ‘migrant’ part was, at best, only half right because many of the people concerned were not economic migrants, but refugees, being victims of a humanitarian emergency.

News organisations should be (and usually are) careful about what they say, because the individual words profoundly affect people’s interpretation.

Because I am cursed with a journalist’s eye and ear, and therefore can’t help assessing every single sentence, one particular word the BBC has been using in the last week has been aggravating me.

According to the headlines at the top of the news, the junior doctors' strike caused thousands of operations to be “cancelled”, but I feel the urge to point out that the correct number was not thousands, but zero.

When something is cancelled, that’s the end of it. Finito.

And since I’m sure that people who, for instance, were waiting for a cataract operation on that day won’t now have to suffer bad vision for the rest of their lives, the operation was not cancelled, but rather postponed.

Like football matches, which are always eventually played, once they have been scheduled, operations during doctors’ strikes are postponed, but not cancelled.

Sadly, these are just two examples of a sloppiness that is creeping into BBC News, and the resulting inaccuracy is, frankly, an unforgivable sin against responsible journalism.

Every day I see thousands of own goals scored against our beautiful mother tongue, but I didn’t expect to see the day when the BBC would be among the top scorers.