Prince Philip could be banned from saying the word "ghastly" after high society magazine Tatler brands it as a "mean little word".
Prince Philip
The 95-year-old royal holds the adjective in high regard as one of his favourite words - having previously used it to describe a trip to Beijing as well as the English city of Stoke-on-Trent - but society bible Tatler have branded the word as "unattractive" and "unfashionable", and wish to ban its use in polite company.
Journalist Anabel Rivkin writes about the term: "Be assured that, should this word pass your lips, it will say so much more about you than about the party or person to whom you refer."
Anabel goes on to state that whilst the word was previously used frequently when people felt the need to "pass judgement", it has now become "rather gauche" and should be avoided at all costs.
She concluded in the magazine: "'Ghastly' was the social word of the decade. We devoured it. We dropped it like a little bomb whenever we felt the need to pass judgement.
"But guess what? That ghastly ship has sailed. The ghastly horse has bolted. The ghastly milk is spilt. It is most definitely time for a ghastly moratorium.
"'Ghastly' is a kind of external manifestation of an internal mean-spiritedness. Unfashionable. Unattractive. Rather gauche in the end. Don't do it."
Prince Philip - the husband of Queen Elizabeth - will likely not listen to the high end magazine, however, as it seems "ghastly" has become part of his every day vocabulary.
During a conversation with the Aircraft Research Association in 2002, the Duke of Edinburgh said: "If you travel as much as we do, you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort, provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly."
And asked during a trip to Australia in 1992 if he would like to stroke a koala, he replied: "Oh no, I might catch some ghastly disease."
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