Kids these days. With their damn-fangled computer games and their MySpaces on the interwebs.

Gone are the days when kids would insult each other with terms like stupid-head or dumb-dumb. As a parent of two young daughters who get into the ruff'n'tumble more often than not, we always put a stop to the name calling as soon as it occurs.

So what do you do when one calls the other a 'bad bonus level'? All I could do was laugh my head off. It's not something that would offend anyone - except game designers perhaps. And how do you reprimand something like that anyway?

Is this the sort of insult we can expect from future generations? Or is it my fault for giving my daughter her first PC when she was just 2.5 years old? I don't know the answer to that.

At first I couldn't see the harm in what I am now officially dubbing NANC - or Nerd Analogy Name Calling^TM. But then one day they could easily start calling fat kids 'bloatware' or refer to kids lacking social skills as having 'bad ADSL sync', which are less harmful than the alternatives 'Fatso' and 'Freak' but their impact might be the same none-the-less.

Anyway, NANC is a new phenomenon to us and we will watch it carefully, as should any other parent raising children in a generation far more cyber than when we were raised.

Happy parenting.