I AM proud of the public debate stirred up over the years by this column, and of the reader response generated by my simple prose. We have discussed worthy subjects such as shock hospital service cuts, crippling council tax increases, unfair speed cameras and frightening road hazards.

But none of these topics have come close to causing the type of reader feedback generated by a piece I penned last week.

No, it wasn’t the emotive outpouring on the destruction of the maple tree on The Rye, which was the main article on the page.

Instead, the public went absolutely bonkers over the trivial four-paragraph filler piece beneath this – about the letters ‘GRY’.

I told how I’d been left scratching my head over the answer to a pub quiz question which asked which three words in the English language ended with those letters.

HUNGRY and ANGRY were the obvious first answers, but then like everyone else I’d asked, I was completely stumped after that.

So I called upon the good people of Bucks to help me find the third word.

And I had to give a gry, er I mean wry, smile when I looked at my email inbasket on Monday morning – because readers had responded in their droves.

The most common answer was AGGRY – decorated glass beads used as ornaments in West Africa.

Several emailers came up with this – and my thanks go to Jackie Kay, Viv Crabb and Brian Lawrence among others.

But the story does not end there.

Brian Lawrence then wrote again to say he had found AHUNGRY – which is overcome with need for food. “It is archaic, but is in the dictionary,” he told me.

But others, such as Gary Parker and Jason Cashman, found a different take on the whole subject.

“It is ENERGY – the GRY do not have to be in order,” said Gary.

Chris Rowan, from Hazlemere, found an online crossword solver which told him PUGGRY was a word. It is a light scarf wound around hat or helmet to protect the head from the sun.

But how could this word suddenly appear out of the blue, I wondered, and was it correct?

Ed Lord, from Holmer Green, cleared up this point with the most convincing response of them all.

“The answer is there is no third word in the active English language – there are some 124 that are obsolete or are compound words,” said Ed.

A couple of readers kindly sent me google links to articles on the internet. I decided to print them off for ease of reading – and then caused a paper shortage in the Star offices because of the extraordinary lengths of the articles written on this humble subject.

Wikipedia, the internet encyclopaedia, says the riddle of GRY has no good answer, yet it has become ‘the most frequently-asked word puzzle’.

Its earliest origins can be traced back to 1975 when Merriam-Webster, publishers of the leading American dictionaries, received a letter from Patricia Lasker of Brooklyn in New York. She said her manager had heard the question on a quiz show.

Since that time, the dictionary company has received about four letters each year asking the same question.

Wikipedia reveals there are lots of trick versions of the riddle, such as the ENERGY answer from Gary Parker and Jason Cashman.

For instance, there is a phonetic version where you say you want to know the three words that end in GREE including HUNGRY and ANGRY. The answer, of course, is AGREE.

On and on the debate went – to the point where my eyes began going round in circles from reading the different permutations for a meaningless word puzzle.

Hey, I know – does anyone out there fancy talking about council tax again?