Why say crocodile when you can say knobbly monster?

ARE you the sort of person who calls fish fingers “cod digits” or a Scotch egg a “porcine-poultry hybrid”?

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This is the weird and wacky world of writers (aka word assembly technicians) with too much time on their hands and a fear of using the same noun when referring to something for a second time.

Reporters and those who edit their work sometimes go to desperate lengths to avoid repetition.

The convoluted results are known in the news business as “knobbly monsters’, after an example from a Sun story about crocodiles.