As we all know, language and attitudes tend to be fairly set by late teens. Some of us older folk may not always notice the passing of time and possibly fail to keep with the shifting sands of what's permissible and what isn't.

In doing so I stepped on a verbal landmine a few days back and I'm interested to hear from others who might accidentally have done the same.

I was chatting to a substantially younger girl I know and date on a friendly and casual basis.

We were talking about getting something to eat and I said, "Oh, let's go and get xxx" where xxx when I was a teen was a widely used and entirely normal term to use for a style of ethnic food that I'm partial to.

Horrified she said to me "You can't say that word, that's racist" and she really was pretty upset about it. That was the verbal landmine, because in my own peer group, it's a term that nobody would turn a hair to and is still widely used as nobody has figured out that it's bad yet.

How many others can tell stories of similar stumbles or mis-steps that you have accidentally detonated across the generational divide, or seen set off by someone else? I'd ask for advice on avoiding it in the future, but I'm not sure there is any other than 'be careful'.