So even the courts can move with the times. OK, a bit behind the times: after almost 60 years of independence, India?s lawyers are to cease addressing Indian judges as the quintessentially British My Lord.

The British fondness for titles, honorifics and the flummery that goes with them is rightly notorious. It has affected the language too, and not just in Britain. Your Honor is a commonplace in American courts. Right Honourable is the correct prefix in Canada and Australia to the names of sundry senior figures of the judiciary or government. Dublin has a Worshipful Lord Mayor, and freemasons? lodges throughout the English-speaking world have Worshipful Masters.

Not all this sort of nonsense can be blamed on us Brits. His Excellency, the common English term for ambassadors and most heads of state, may have originated in Italy; the Philippines? His/Her Illustrious Excellency for that country?s president began life in Spanish. His Serene Highness is a rough translation from German. But your wordcager?s fellow-countrymen have pushed these forms of address to extremes, at times to comic linguistic effect.

Thus our House of Commons is peopled by honourable members, some of whom would barely recognize honour, nor want to, if it got up and slapped them in the face; though they?d readily accept an honour in return for political or cash contributions to the ruling party of the day.

The real-world city of London has a plain mayor, elected for four years and a powerful political figure. The ?City of London?, capital ?C? ? that city as delimited centuries ago, today its main financial district ? has a lord mayor. But, except by accident, he isn?t even a lord, and his 12 months in office amount to little more than occasional pageantry and banquets for the great and the good. Yet write to this gentleman, and your envelope, to be formally correct, must be addressed to The Right Honourable the Lord Mayor.

That wording goes for the equally powerless mayors of York, Cardiff and Belfast. But beware, the city of Exeter, outdoing Dublin, has a Right Worshipful the Lord Mayor. And a worshipful mayor is to be found in many minor places, from small cities down to the London borough of Kingston, with (in 2005-06) its Worshipful Mayor, Councillor Yogan Yoganathan.

Back in London, the capital-C City thereof is stuffed with worshipfuls. But these are its ?livery companies?, descendants of the ancient trade guilds, bearing such names as the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers/Goldsmiths/Clockmakers/ etc, or indeed, since 1992, of Information Technologists, such is modern Britain?s nostalgia for relics of its past.

None of this, as the freemasons are eager to point out, means that the man or guild is worthy of worship or even full of it: worship began life as worth-ship, worthiness. So Your Worship just means that the mayor (or, in the past, justices of the peace) is a good guy.

That still leaves a question: why Your? And, beyond that, another one. The toastmaster at some very grand banquet, with Queen Elizabeth and her offspring among the guests, will start off orotundly ? you can almost hear the capital letters ? ?Your Majesty, Your Royal Highnesses, My Lords, ladies and gentlemen??? Why your for some, and my for others?

My at least makes sense; and there is a parallel in the French monsieur, and arguably in the Latin Pater noster, the Christians? Our Father. But your is beyond reason. Nor is the usage constant. Members of Britain?s upper house of parliament will address their fellows collectively as ?My Lords?, but in the same breath go on, ?Your lordships will be aware...?.

The my can at times (times past, mostly) be used not only when talking to the peer concerned but about him, as in the butler?s ?My lord has gone to Brighton, madam?, or Shakespeare?s ?And there?s my lord of Worcester?. More often, though, and more respectfully, the butler would refer to him as his lordship. Likewise, his wife is her ladyship, and the grander banqueters become her majesty and their royal highnesses.

And there?s another conundrum: again, why? English knows no other instance where ? as in many languages ? his, her, their and the like agree in gender or number with the object they apply to, rather than the subject on whose behalf they are applied. The French say son mari and sa femme. We say her husband and his wife. But are we here, for this once, aping them?

In fact, not so, say grammarians. We?ve assimilated his lordship to he or him, the queen?s majesty to she or her, the royal princelings to they or them. It?s still very odd.

Even odder are other quirks of British nobocratic usage. How can a chap be Viscount So-and-So, when he doesn?t actually hold that viscountcy? What distinguishes Lady Jane Grey from mere Lady Grey? How, short of a sex-change, can Britain have a Princess Paul? Who, what or why are Black Rod or Gold Stick in Waiting or the Lord Lyon King at Arms? These questions, happily, are not part of your wordcager?s portfolio: they?re arcana of Britain?s class structure, not its language. Most Britons, wisely, know little about them and care less.