Sam Clough, of Cessnock, refers to our Wednesday item about Nancy-Bird Walton and asks: "Is 'aviatrix' politically correct?" Who knows? It's a great word either way, and was certainly in general use when Nancy-Bird Wilson was one. Oh, and please note the placement of the hyphen. We have been informed by several readers (and indeed by Qantas) that the hyphen has been so placed at the request of the lady herself. "Nancy-Bird asked Qantas to show her name this way, as her preference is to adopt the hyphenation that her late husband used (between her first name and the first word of her last name)," writes Felicity Coombs, of Waterloo. "Qantas has honoured that wish, and the aircraft shows her name in the form 'Nancy-Bird Walton', despite her strictly correct name being with the hyphenated last name." Mystery explained, and we stand corrected.

"I claim the 'tinder box' of matches!" enthuses Wallace Anker (First sighting of the summer fire season cliche, Column 8, Wednesday), and refers us to a story in Monday's Goulburn Post. Sadly, the quote is that a fire had "jumped the tinder dry country", and so, no cigar nor matches to light it with. The phrase has to include "tinder box". If we get the exact, classic line "The state is a tinder box", we'll send two boxes of matches to the reader who reports it. We can't be fairer than that.

Don Hartley, of Balmain, reports that he saved a drowning blue-tongue lizard from the harbour during the week. "It was a close call - I gave him a squeeze and a lot of water came out of both ends of him. I got him back to shore and he staggered off." It made us wonder: when was the last time anyone spotted a blue-tongue in inner-Sydney? And speaking of wildlife, we still need to know whether big cats eat small cats.

"Having recently acquired a GPS car navigator, I am intrigued about The Voice," writes E. Mark Latham, of Cabarita. "How did it get in there? Where does it come from? Mine has a female timbre with a vaguely Asian-American intonation. Do the software suppliers have staff who sit there all day reading the street indexes of foreign cities? If so, they could do with better training on how to pronounce our street names. A street near us is called Ian Parade, appearing on maps as Ian Pde. The first time I heard this from The Voice, it took some time to work out where I was. I was apparently turning into Yann Puddy."

"Derry Thomas's tale of an enterprising student using images of Auckland to illustrate his India assignment sparked memories from the 1970s of my brother Geoffrey's high school project on the tundra," recalls Lori Face, of Wamberal. "Lacking in both time and material, but not audacity, he captioned a Borneo jungle scene replete with native Dayaks with 'This is not the tundra and these are not eskimos.' His teacher duly marked and returned said project with '10/10. This is not your mark."'

Column8@smh.com.au(no attachments please).Phone 9282 2207 fax 9282 2772. (include name, suburb, daytime phone)