Tim Worstall

Ed Balls, in his infinite fucking wisdom, has decided that Latin is a useless subject in schools. Like Boris Johnson, I am outraged, not least because this is my livelihood at stake.
The joy and value of Latin being taught in schools and the defence of it being of course entirely separate from this [...]

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Strange that a philosopher should not know this.
Falling and being in love is a glorious feeling. We need a different word to describe our love for our neighbour
We have two perfectly good words which make this distinction.
Eros and agape.
True, we simply nicked ‘em from the Greeks but then we’ve done that with large parts of [...]

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“As the most over-examined generation, which invests the most money into its education, polyglots should get more recognition for their language skills. They are still sorely underrated here, particularly if you do not wish to pursue professions traditionally associated with languages, such as interpreting, translation or teaching. Abroad of course, the demand is high for [...]

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Umm:
At an Intelligence Squared debate last week, Professor Mary Beard gave some indications of how the teaching of languages has suffered in state education.
- Fewer than 500 state schools now offer any classical languages and much of this teaching is offered in the ‘twilight’ hours after most classes have finished.
- The government is not providing [...]

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Yes, like this one:
When something has crossed the parody horizon, it becomes impossible to parody (that, of course, is a common idiom) for the simple reason that any parody would be indistinguishable from the original.
Similar to “jumping the shark” perhaps.
“Polly has crossed the parody horizon”….yes, works for me.

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So, a question.
The widow of Ferdinand Marcos disclosed last week that she is pushing her son Ferdinand Jr, 51, known as “Bongbong”, to stand for president next year.
…
He was educated at Worth, a Benedictine boarding school in West Sussex.
I remember, when I was at the prep school there, seeing the limo coming to [...]

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Anyone help with this?
For the past couple of days it’s been difficult to load a page. Keep getting “Connection reset” page.
“connection reset while this page was loading”.
Is this something on my machine? Or further down the line at my ISP?
Hitting “try again” four or five times usually loads the page.
Any ideas?
Update: All fixed now. Something [...]

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Here.
France’s new education minister has become a national laughing stock after he handed out a document on how to tackle poor spelling which was full of mistakes.
Muphry’s points out that any attempt to correct the spelling or grammar of another piece will contain further errors of spelling or grammar of greater magnitude than the original.
Works [...]

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Staff at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission have been advised to use ‘miserable day’ instead of ‘black day’. The Commission claims that certain words carry a ‘hierarchical valuation of skin colour’.
Look, it’s one thing to be so hopelessly PC as to invite the ridicule these people are going to get.

It’s quite another to quite [...]

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Gosh, there’s so much here:
Teachers need to do more work to improve children’s vocabulary and make it clear when the use of slang and colloquialisms are not acceptable, academics have found.
That is, do not let it all hang out as everyone’s been told for the past few decades. There [...]

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The couple met when Young was a rising property entrepreneur and Michelle was working in the retail industry.
What does “working in the retail industry” mean?
Shopgirl?

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but the fact of course remains that there is no such thing as a ‘government-funded charity’; the new and politically correct term is ‘quango-with-a-licence-to-beg’.

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Some people don’t get it, do they?

Helen Reynolds, a health and safety officer with Lancashire Constabulary, said that the current phrase, which praises officers for acting “with no thought to his or her safety” should be toned down.
She suggested changing the words to "fully recognising the risks to their [...]

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"We had great times here. There were artists and writers all around. Great parties. They’re all gone now," says the former communist. "Now half the families in my block are immigrants. They can’t speak German. They can’t even speak English."

Slightly odd final line, no?
Or is speaking English really that much of a marker of modernity?

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Should one vilipend a Miliband? Is OLAF olid? Parliament recrement?

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Report here about the latest list of do not and must use words. For example, we should not use "seminal" or "disseminate" as these are rooted in "semen" and thus are sexist.
The full list is here.
To be honest, the full list isn’t all that terribly bad. It’s certainly better to have people muttering dimly about [...]

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Now I really, really want to understand this: I would like to get inside the head of that person – that self-important, officious nebbish of a council official – who actually believes that these are appropriate uses of the anti-terror legislation designed to prevent mass murder.

Great to see the word "nebbish" being used here. There [...]

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They appear to be run by aliens, ones with only the most tenuous knowledge of the English language:

Peter Fahy, head of race and diversity, said: "Having listened to the British Association for Women in Policing it was clear many forces wanted to produce a better uniform themselves. It is at that level that the proposals [...]

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It’s Wednesday. Hump Day. So a competition is in order I think.
Merriam Webster is a publisher of dictionaries and reference books and as part of their annual PR campaign ("Buy your three year old daughter a dictionary for Christmas" type thing) they release a list of "Words of the Year". This year’s number one word [...]

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It’s rare to see an entirely new insult. So well done Chris:

So fuck you, you one eyed kilt snake.

Can you guess, without looking, who he’s talking about?

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