Season's greetings. Welcome one and all to Daily Telegraph associate editor Simon Heffer's pre-Christmas pedantathon – the latest in a long line of email missives to staff highlighting recent egregious deviations from the Telegraph style bible and other general sloppiness to have crossed the pages of the nation's most popular quality newspaper. Certainly nothing wrong with his desire for excellence, Mnokey thunks.
Yuletide sees the Heff focusing on the difficulty that some at the Telegraph have with geography. He's quite correct that Lowestoft isn't in Norfolk.
Appreciation of the finest works of Wordsworth seem also to have passed some by. "We claimed that William Blake's most famous poems are 'Jerusalem' and 'Daffodils'. The poem now vulgarly named 'Daffodils' was called 'I wandered lonely as a cloud' when Wordsworth wrote it, and his view ought to be taken seriously."
Quite correct Heff.
Perhaps prophetically it is amongst the blogs, that most wretched and down-market of publishing forms, where the foulest aspects of the language are discussed. But even they can't find a decent home, it seems.
"Could I also remind you that where we are representing profanities we don't need to give a hint of what the word is," he wrote. "Leave that up to the reader to decide in keeping with his or her level of incipient coarseness.
"So the most offensive word in the English language is ----. We had it in a blog as c---t, making it an offensive five-letter word, presumably 'count'."
Copies of Roger Melly's Profanasaurus in all Telegraph stockings this year then?
