Words: presliced, adj.

RAJ SHARMA of Leicester's Sharma store laments: "Sometimes it's a lonely business. But with The Grocer you feel you've got someone on your side." In Jane Kelly's "Focus on Pizza", Green Isle Foods' managing director Michael Dwyer lauds "the next generation main meal pizza" which, says Ms Kelly, is Feast of Flavours "presliced with sharing in mind".

Johnson defines pre- as "a particle which, prefixed to words derived from the Latin, marks priority of time or rank". Whatever the inability to slice pizza, why, in this era of business "efficiency", is so much breath wasted in adding a syllable inherent in such words as booked? Swift noted, "You need not wipe your knife to cut bread; because in cutting a slice or two it will wipe itself."