He says, she says - On amazeballs and domestic goddesses

He says: Sometimes it's hard to find the right words

Amazeballs is not a word. I don't care what those nice people at the Collins English Dictionary say.

Now before you accuse me of being the linguistic equivalent of a Luddite, I'm not someone who objects to the evolution of our vocabulary.

Cyberbullying, bioarchaeology, Facebook, liveblog, livestream – these have all been adopted into everyday speech by virtue of the fact that they are new and different and we had to have a word to explain what they were.

They are among 86 phrases and words added to the online dictionary and many of them deserve to be there.

Amazeballs, however, is twaddle. It's supposed to be used instead of words like awesome, amazing, brilliant, fantastic and any other word for "good" that you can think of. It's not like we need it given the vast array of synonyms.

I wouldn't mind but the only reason amazeballs came to such prominence is that a celebrity blogger called Perez Hilton told everyone to spread it on Twitter and like a bunch of bleeting, digital sheep the world did as it was told.

Amazeballs sounds like someone was in the middle of saying "amazing" but got distracted by the sight of the shadow chancellor.

It's the sort of "word" that Fearne Cotton would come out with among the rest of the verbal flatulence she emitted during the BBC's Diamond Jubilee coverage.

English is such a beautiful language full of the most exquisite words that roll off the tongue like giddy Smarties.

I love the sound of bungalow, harbinger, laby-rinthine, lilt and quintessential along with the more simple pleasures of saying bum, knickerbockers, plonker and moon.

Collins offered people the chance to submit new words for consideration and a woman from Nottingham chose amazeballs because her 10-year-old daughter uses it all the time.

That's not a reason. Parents are meant to teach their kids to not talk gibberish, to eat their greens, do their homework and go to bed. They're not meant to get their claptrap into the dictionary so we all have to suffer.

What do I know though? As far as the newly recognised words are concerned I'm a denialist, making a faff about squadoosh when you other fanboys think amazeballs is totes bang tidy.

She says: An example I have found extremely hard to follow

Nigella makes it look so easy. Gliding around her designer kitchen in her designer frock, she makes cooking appear fluid and foxy. Something that can be completed in the flick of a glossy curl, posh manicure still intact.

For me however – and I hope millions of others out there – the halo and wings of a domestic goddess do not come easy.

I've never boiled a potato, my bedsheets go weeks without being changed and my fridge contains little more than Diet Coke, salsa and white wine.

Ashamed by this, and quite rightly so, the last thing I need is added pressure from the likes of Lorraine Pascale and Kirstie Allsopp.

Allsopp in particular is almost offensive in her smugness, somehow managing to make me feel guilty for not making my own chintzy throw cushions when she's clearly the mad one here.

But these wonder women have got the better of me. I've caved in.

This week I embarked upon a mission to become the perfect all-cooking, all-cleaning domestic queen.

I've made boeuf bourguignon, chicken pie and ginger flapjacks. Heck, I've even bought a rolling pin. I barely recognise myself.

However, although I somehow managed to avoid any major culinary disasters and now have the happiest boyfriend in the world, I simply cannot keep this up.

I did not glide like Nigella, I slipped, tripped and panicked my way around that kitchen, covered in a delightful mixture of flour, mustard and mushroom juice. I also squirted lemon juice into my own eye and made enough pie to feed to the 5,000.

But apart from my general clumsiness, the cost and timescale of these endeavours also took their toll. The only reason I could attempt the three-hour (three hours!?!) boeuf bourguignon was because I had a day off work.

There is no way I could sit in a stressful newsroom all day and then attempt such a dish come hometime. The most I can usually manage after work is the pop, pop, pop of my microwave meal plastic. And even that's an effort.

So while they may mean well, Nigella & Co are clearly out of touch. It's time to move on from "lifestyle manuals" like Kirstie's Handmade Home and How To Be A Domestic Goddess and be more realistic.

Eating for the Exhausted? How To Be A Normal Human Being, anyone?