When the question was first posed I wanted to yell “No” at my computer. In fact, I think I did, secure in the privacy of my own home.

It is a question that confronts users of the internet almost every day. And one that continues to irritate the pedant in me.

Will I accept cookies? No, I will not. It is an abominable American word that we are seeing more and more on supermarket shelves, in cake shops and coffee bars as a replacement for the time-honoured biscuit. Nor am I alone in this opposition.  At least one other person has been equally enraged; so much so that they have written to the Morrisons supermarket chain asking whey it has decided to bastardise the English language by labelling its products as cookies.

He clearly wonders what has the good honest biscuit done to deserve being trampled on and superseded by this trans-Atlantic upstart? What is the reasoning; where is the benefit, the improvement, that justifies such trespass?

But… pause for thought. Is not “biscuit” an amalgamation of the French phrase bis cuit, meaning twice cooked? As is the Italians’ biscotti. And did not the Americans derive their cookie from the koekje of their Dutch immigrants?

Thus, as often been proved, we are nothing more than a band of linguistic thieves and plagiarists. Do I accept cookies. Hmmm, seems I must… but with much mumbling and grumbling.