Dear Mary | 14 August 2010

Q. Please can you advise on a matter that, although seemingly trivial, is causing some tension in our household. Like many families, rather than spreading butter on our toast at breakfast time, we have switched to one of the supposedly healthier alternative low-fat spreads. Our problem is by what name should we refer to this new product? My wife continues to ask if I’d please pass the butter, but as it isn’t butter, I find this irksome. If I refer to it as margarine, she is annoyed by the implication that we are using some inferior low-quality butter substitute. To request that someone passes the low-fat spread is hardly elegant. Please, Mary, can you advise on the correct terminology?

C.S., Woodbridge, Suffolk

A. Why not use the word ‘lubricant’? The products to which you refer are, technically, lubricants, and when you have guests they will enjoy laughing at your use of this term.

Q. I have just been on a cruise from Venice to South America. At dinner one evening, a waiter came up to our table. He asked one person (a woman sitting opposite my wife) if she had ordered a cup of coffee. The answer was no. Then very quickly, he appeared to slip so that the coffee and cup were projected towards my wife’s bosom. She reeled backwards but no mess appeared. The waiter vanished. Someone said this was a ‘joke’ cup. My wife was shocked by the event and I became cross when I realised what had happened. We talked about moving to another dining room but decided to stick it out until the end of the cruise. At the end I made comments to the management, saying I had never seen such rudeness and there might have been an accident.