11 February 2012 12:00 AM
"Chaos on roads and railways to continue today, warn forecasters." That headline appeared over a news story on Monday. It happens every winter: severe weather is greeted by the absurdly overdramatic word "chaos". Of course, "chaos" is a short word, and as such very difficult to keep out of headlines.
04 February 2012 12:00 AM
In a time when nobody is ever held personally responsible for anything, and all we have to do after any disaster is "make sure that the lessons are learnt", the word "scapegoat" has undergone a change.
28 January 2012 12:00 AM
Bad mark: "Monday marked the six-month anniversary of Winehouse's death," said a news story on Thursday.
21 January 2012 12:00 AM
The other day somebody said "dichotomy" and I was transported back half a century. You hardly ever hear that word nowadays, but back in the Sixties everything seemed to be a dichotomy. Words go in and out of fashion like anything else.
14 January 2012 12:00 AM
Several times this week we used "lengthy" as a lengthy version of "long".
07 January 2012 12:00 AM
Dashed long: On Monday we inflicted a 49-word sentence on readers in our report that Gordon Brown's emails were "hacked" when he was Chancellor.
31 December 2011 12:00 AM
Those of us who remember the "anti-Vietnam" demonstrations were carried back to the 1960s by the following opening of a news story on Wednesday: "Poor Tony.
24 December 2011 12:00 AM
The word "but" is sometimes used in the first paragraph of a news report to suggest a tension that is not there. We had one on Monday.
17 December 2011 12:00 AM
Out of his mind: We noted a tension in American ideas about money in a leading article on Monday.
10 December 2011 12:00 AM
Arbitrary rules govern what you can leave out of headlines.
03 December 2011 12:00 AM
News, as we all know, is about people.
26 November 2011 12:00 AM
Two sentences published this week illustrate the use and abuse of the overused phrase "when it comes to ...".
19 November 2011 12:00 AM
The debasement of the word "hero" is sad, not to say unpleasant. Any citizen who upholds the law is a "have-a-go hero".
12 November 2011 12:00 AM
This is from a news story published on Monday: "Downton Abbey [is] facing criticism for substituting dramatic credibility for soap-style pacing and plot twists." My thanks to Andrew Horsman, who drew attention to that.
05 November 2011 12:00 AM
In last Saturday's restaurant review, John Walsh was inspired to an ecstatic gastro-lyricism by the high-class English fare at Rules in Covent Garden.
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