Sunday 9 May 2010

Still going...

Hello all,

Another one of those huge gaps, I'm afraid; I've simply been too busy with the old lecturing to put something up of late, even with the goading of the general election to tempt me. Of which, a pick'n'mix of observations:

1) Cameron's closing statement at that first televised debate - manifesto in a nutshell, or 80s power ballad in rough draft?
2) Surely the issue with Gillian Duffy was not the subject she raised, but how she raised it; that is, the rather loaded term 'flocking.' The first casualty of electoral war, it seems, is close reading.
3) Proofreading, too, took a bit of a pounding. D J Taylor wrote a nice piece in the Independent on inept political language, mostly pointing out the errors of the Liberal Democrats (my local council candidate actually managed to sneak a superfluous apostrophe into the name of my ward); the BBC was unusually dreadful, averaging one obvious mistake a day. The best one occurred minutes before the beginning of the final debate, with a spectacularly incoherent headline featuring 'Barak Obama'.
4) Once again, 'Victorian' gets wheeled out pejoratively, this time to describe the UK's electoral system. Excuse me, but something the Victorians were very good at was organising stuff. Electoral reform, too, was something of a recurrent Victorian theme, though no doubt we'll all be told that, like sex, it was invented in the 1960s.

More to follow, no doubt. For the moment, an admin note; comments are now subject to moderation, since about 50% of the comments being left seem to be Chinese proverbs that conveniently link to sites selling bargain trainers ("Wow! These are genuine Niks!") or crushed tiger essence that offers terrifying powers of potency ("Erectile dysfunction? Hip trouble? With just one pill, you too can become a peripatetic priapic!"). Ah, to think that by calling it "Plato's Pharmacy" they could attract a whole new poststructuralist market.

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