"The move comes after a weekend of lurid and damaging headlines on Mr Prescott's affair with his diary secretary, Tracey Temple, dominating the Sunday newspapers. He is facing an internal Whitehall inquiry after the former Tory whip Derek Conway filed a complaint demanding an investigation into Ms Temple's use of government cars to travel to and from trysts with Mr Prescott."
Outside the pages of The Sun, The Mirror and The Daily Mail, who has trysts? The Guardian then has the cheek to blame bloggers for misuse of language (here):
"If you believe the internet is the fount of all wisdom, giving free rein to bloggers to exercise their vocal cords, think again. Ancient English cliches and expressions are being mangled by the culture of cut and paste and the spread of unchecked writing on the internet.
According to the Oxford English Corpus, a database of a billion words, dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English.
"Straight-laced" is used 66% of the time even though it should be written "strait-laced", according to lexicographers working for Oxford Dictionaries, who record the way English is spoken and written by monitoring books, television, radio and newspapers and, increasingly, websites and blogs.
"Just desserts" is used 58% of the time instead of the correct spelling, "just deserts" (desert is a variation of deserve), while 59% of all written examples of the phrase in the Corpus call it a "font of knowledge or wisdom" when it should be "fount"."
Newspapers, on the other hand, hardly ever make mistakes?
1 comment:
Vocal Cords?
Are they beige?
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