The wording was very polite, but it was nevertheless graffiti, urging others not to follow the example that had just been set.

The word graffiti means something like scribbling, or scratching, usually or always anonymous.

Some parts of Australia have what is called graffiti days, special days where people try to paint over graffiti in an attempt to eradicate the defacing of walls, toilets and other places.

Some people have put up special areas designed to provide a location for graffitists to exercise their art.

A word often associated with graffiti has been illicit. In other words, people have written on walls in the dead of the night where others could not see them do so. Stores have put spray cans behind bars, in the hope of deterring graffitists.

What is one piece of scribble on the side of a wall, or anywhere else for that matter? It is graffito, a word we almost never hear in our part of the world.

Although scribbling on the side of walls, or on other unsuitable places, has been around for a long time, the modern word for it is reasonably new.

I have to admit that in my home town hundreds of big rocks have been the target of graffitists and in almost every case the graffiti has been something families have come to look at. The writing has been about reunions, or deaths in the family, or praise of the locality. Banning such graffiti on rocks would be an almost-impossible task.

My big dictionary gives a definition of graffito and then says the plural is graffiti, although in my opinion graffiti is coming around to mean the singular as well as the plural. How many times have you heard of graffito?

The word comes to us through Italian, meaning a scratch. My big dictionary gives as a definition “a scribbling on an ancient wall, such as those at Pompeii and Rome”. I can’t remember seeing any graffiti in Rome when I went there. Maybe I wasn’t looking for graffiti.

The first use of graffito I could find came in 1851 when Sir Daniel Wilson writing in the Archaeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland said the slight scratching in ruins was “mere graffiti”. He didn’t say what he expected -- the Mona Lisa, perhaps.

In 1886 a comment was made about graffiti “as may be found in schoolgirls’ copy books”. I have to say that, in my opinion, school boys are more adept at graffiti than school girls, but I might be wrong.

Girls wouldn’t do such a thing, would they?

Some graffiti might be attractive, but people don’t like seeing scribble on their walls, no matter how attractive it might be.