POLITICAL correctness has clearly infected Thomas the Baker's in Church Street, York. They cannot bring themselves to describe one of their confections as a gingerbread man but have not done the obvious thing and called it a gingerbread person. Instead, they have opted for "ginger person".

As any student of Cockney rhyming slang will confirm, describing someone (or, in this case, something) as "ginger" is a derivative of "ginger beer", a reference to sexuality. So perhaps Thomas isn't being quite as politically correct as he had hoped!

Richard Billinge,

Heworth Village, York.

Updated: 09:28 Friday, September 20, 2002