The Songstone

The Swill is a journalist, of a sort, best known for stuffing his face on an expense account and writing about it. In a long and unvaried career he has managed to offend the Welsh - "loquacious, dissemblers, immoral liars, stunted, bigoted, dark, ugly, pugnacious little trolls", the English - "a lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd", the Manx - "hopeless, inbred mouth-breathers known as Bennies" and Clare Balding - "a dyke on a bike".  Our hero has been married twice (once to a Tory MP), shot a baboon whom he wasn't married to and is an alcoholic. Worryingly, he has also sired four children and, like Hitler, is a failed artist. Restaurant reviews don't interest me; restaurant reviewers still less, and in the normal way of things the Swill's vapid meanderings would have passed me by, but when a man who makes a small fortune from modest talent has the cheek to call expats in the Gulf    " parasites a

Getting my students off their Blackberries and iphones is a never-ending struggle. I've given them an utterly fascinating exercise on memo-writing and what do you know? Half the ingrates are surreptitiously tapping away, hoping I won't notice. Sometimes I pretend not to, but it amazes me how wedded they are to the wretched things. I have visions of them waking up in a cold sweat at 3am, anxious in case they've missed the latest tweet. Anyway, during a break yesterday I heard an appalling screaming coming from a student's phone. I looked up; naturally it was Abdullah .  "What on earth is that noise?" I said testily. "Nothing, teacher, just a video of a girl." I looked askance. "Surely you're not watching naughty videos again, Abdullah? There's a time and a place you know." He looked chastened. "Oh no, teacher. It's not that. This is a girl being buried alive." "What?" "In Iran," he said helpfully.

I could give you a list of the cognitive associations that led me to choose these three clips, in this order, but I shan't: with thanks to John Wells : and from the 2nd Red Scare :

There we were, last class of the day, and I've made the students work like slaves for four hours. Time to ease up a bit, so we sit round in a circle and they tell some anecdotes. Abdullah, who owns six Arabian geldings, and has a penchant for taking photos of his innumerable Filipina girlfriends, regaled us with this story, which I shall share with you. "Fifteen years ago a friend of mine, who was 14 at the time, drove out into the desert with a guy who had promised to let him drive his pickup. He was a beautiful boy: long hair, smooth face, and the guy wanted to fuck him. "No, no," said my friend, but the guy was drunk on whiskey and had a gun and his way. When he stopped the pickup to have a pee my friend grabbed the gun and shot him five times, then ran over the body. He came back to Doha in the pickup and with some of his friends went back, drove the body to a remote spot and buried it in the sand, throwing the whiskey bottle into the grave with a curse. Unfo

That instead of this tawdry little story , Sky News ran something like this: The producer of the long-running TV series hit Midwonder Blunders has been commended after saying part of the show's appeal is an absence of Tories. Brian False-Gay, the drama's co-creator, who has been with it since day one, said in an interview that the shows - which have run for 14 series - "wouldn't work" if there were any Tories in the village life. "We just don't have Tories involved. Because it wouldn't be the English village with them. It just wouldn't work. Suddenly we might be in Old Amersham. "Ironically, Boreston (one of the main centres of population in the show) is supposed to be Old Amersham. And if you went into Old Amersham you wouldn't see a human face there. "We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way," he added. ITV was quick to praise Mr False-Gay's remarks. "We are delighted and eu

I have been looking at Google Labs and their NGram viewer , which allows you to research the use of any word or phrase in the book corpora of (so far) English, French, Hebrew, Russian and Spanish from 1800 to 2000 and spot trends. I have been playing with this and offer one example . 'You' fell from a peak of over 2 instances per 1000 printed words in 1900 to just over 1.2 per 1000 in 1965 (a 40% drop!) before rising again over the past 40 years. Why did 'you' fall so dramatically out of favour? Why has it revived? Was 1965 a particularly selfish year? Are we now writing about others more than about ourselves? Perhaps not . Certainly the long-term trend for 'I' is quite similar to 'you' with a peak at about 1900 and a steady decline thereafter (although since 1980 and the rise of the New Right it seems to be on the increase again). Even so, at 3.5 per 1000 it is still twice as common as 'you' and more common than any other pronoun. Our favouri