Tim Worstall

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 [...]

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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 is a formal language [...]

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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 own safety". Speaking at [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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Sigh: "Taking the example of the Local Employment Partnerships, claims of indirect discrimination could arise if the effect of these was to encourage employers to employ less migrant workers and more people on benefits, who by virtue of the rules on benefit entitlement might be more likely to be British," the study states. That’s a [...]

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