Want Not, Waste Not

(September 2010)

New Criterion:

pace Iran, her front section is her own business.

1066 And All That. A Jackson-tailored newspaper would have English Kings “dying of a surfeit in the usual way”, the French as a Bad Thing, and the rest of the world as quite “numb and vague”. On the other side of the paper – for I would ignore Sellar and Yeatman’s instructions to print on one side only – would be a series of Carry- On-Up-the Kyber-meets-Round-the-Horne puns about limp editions and firm sales. This would be a flop (ooooh, matron!) for it would have nothing to feed on but itself. The whole point of a 1066 And All That template is to apply it to real news, to contexts outside itself – the less appropriate the better – and the point of saucy puns is hard to make but good to find.

 that counts the frequency of words you use or sites visited.

Apparently I write like Dan Brown, but I think that’s a big plot. New English Review reader Xanthippe noted a few more serious errors:

 indulging in a bit of flirty fishing? For that matter, a particularly stupid algorithm, or Police Community Support Officer, might conclude from my surfing patterns that I was a Jihadist – after all, the J-word keeps turning up on my screen.


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