Rod Liddle: What do you call travellers when they are no longer travelling? 

How should we describe the people who allegedly abducted that little girl in Greece, after a neighbour claimed that they actually paid £850 for her to a passing Bulgarian? It is a minefield we are entering now, having asked this question. Clearly the terms which hitherto some of us may have employed, not always affectionately — pikey, gyppo, tinker — are likely to get you into trouble with the police these days. Probably more trouble than if you, for example, dug up the road to remove a few hundred yards of fibre optic cable, or declined year upon year to pay your taxes. So those three are out.

Gypsy, we are told, is also a pejorative term, although the Travellers’ Times — an online site which you probably help to pay for somewhere down the line — uses the word happily enough. However, the delicious chocolate- and coconut-flavoured biscuits Gypsy Creams have long since disappeared from the shelves of our supermarkets, lest they in some way give offence.