Leninist MPs – or: Westminster’s shocking philistinism

Are our MPs Lenininst?

Today’s Guardian included an article by Martin Kettle from Bayreuth, declaring that:

Our MPs are Lenininst in their belief that politics is all and excludes a rich artistic life. It’s a sign of a failed society

Buxton Opera HouseWell, I can report that at least in deepest Derbyshire, things aren’t so philistine. The opening night of this year’s Buxton Festival was graced by the new (Labour) Chair of Derbyshire County Council, who far from seeming embarrassed, flaunted his allegiance with a striking red jacket. The fare may have been Saint-Saëns and Gounod rather than Wagner, but as someone who tends to Rossini’s view of Wagner (‘great moments but dull quarter hours’), that to my mind was no bad thing. Lenin may not have dared to listen to Beethoven often (poor man) but it seems he also liked plays – last night I saw Ostrovsky’s Too Clever by Half in a suitably manic production at Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre and discovered that in 1918 Lenin attended and admired the Moscow Art Theatre production starring Stanislavski, seeing it ‘as a portrait of the moral and intellectual failings of the society created under the Tsars’. Perhaps that’s what our politicians can do best for culture – provide the butts for satire?

As befits one of the birthplaces of Chartism, Manchester has long been a place where culture and politics mix. For many years the concert hall, home to the Hallé Orchestra, was the Free Trade Hall, built to commemorate a notorious attack on peaceful protest (which led, amongst other things, to the Manchester Guardian and Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy). The hall was the venue for both high culture (Barbirolli etc) and wrestling. Its replacement, the much more comfortable Bridgewater Hall, is a wonderful concert hall but rather tamer.

As for politicians, others here have already indicated that a few cabinet ministers have betrayed a liking for Wagner. Amongst them is Michael Gove, the minister most likely (pace Martin) to lace his speeches with quotations from (in his words) ‘the best that has been written and said’. If that sometimes means misquotations from Keats (it’s ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ Michael: and you an English graduate!), I suppose we should be grateful. Mr Gove has even shared his admiration of Antonio Gramsci and declared in the Guardian’s own pages this week that ‘classical Marxists support free schools because they embody the ideal of the soviet, a self-managing institution run by workers in the wider public interest’. Such erudition, you see, Martin! What would your old Dad have made of that? I suspect he might have pointed out that the governance of free schools is hardly as open and free as a soviet, or even one of those local authority schools the Secretary of State appears to despise, despite his nominal responsibility for the education of all students in England. I certainly hope Professor Kettle would have seen off such dubious claims to cultural eclecticism.

Having just posted my two penn’orth to Comment is Free, I spotted that tomorrow’s paper will include a number of letters about the Secretary of State’s claims in Thursday’s edition. These include Professor Norman Thomas:

If free schools are doing well (except for some) because they are free from local authority control and can decide things for themselves, does that mean Gove will now introduce a bill bringing the national curriculum to an end instead of extending it, as he currently proposes, even including pressure on how to teach reading – by synthetic phonics? The national curriculum does not have to be taught in free schools or academies, any way, so why impose it on local authority schools?

Surely a Marxist of Mr Gove’s intelligence cannot be so confused as to advocate freedom for schools and at the same time deny it.

School Governors: Dear Leader issues slap in the face to waffling worthies

Gove: School governors are ‘local worthies seeking a badge of status

Michael Gove
Waffling? Surely only politicians are allowed to do that? Michael Gove holds forth: read a riposte from Francis Gilbert here.
As a school governor, you can imagined how cheered I am this morning to learn that this headline appears on the front page of the Times website [paywall]: ‘School governors condemned by Gove: School governors are ‘local worthies seeking a badge of status and the chance to waffle about faddy issues”‘.

I fear I’m not willing to pay News International to read the full article, but am not surprised to see that Michael, as a former Times journalist (and married to Sarah Vine, currently on the staff), has ensured a front page story on his own paper once again, as well as copious coverage in the Telegraph and the BBC.

I picked this up from Warwick Mansell, who also reports ‘Emma Knights, of National Governors’ Association, says: “We’ve had a lot of talk from Michael Gove about governance but not very much about how to improve things…”‘ Emma Knights told the BBC her organisation was ‘incredibly disappointed by the language of the secretary of state’.

It seems Michael Gove has also had a pop at teachers (‘NUT “embracing Trotskyism” at national conference’), so he’s trotting out popular targets (trotting out Trots – see what I did there?) to endear him to his fellow-travellers in The Party. Well, as we know, if the Dear Leader doesn’t like governors, he can sack them and appoint his own – does that make the new ones waffling worthies too?

Meanwhile – and I fear to depress you more, but as I’m in waffling mood –

One responsibility of school governors is to ensure the reporting of statutory tests, such as the recent phonics test for 6 year olds. The DfE’s planned Key Stage 2 English grammar, punctuation and spelling test materials for 2013 are now online here (see the bottom of the page). Geoff Barton, a secondary head, was moved to comment: ‘Look at question 12 and imagine how children will be taught. Read, then weep.’

DfE KS2 test, Q 12
Wait at the door? Whatever for? Ah: think about it!

Of course, this is really just another faddy issue we shouldn’t waste our time waffling about.

Stop press: There’s more on Michael Gove’s speech in the Telegraph today, where his claims that boards of governors resemble ‘Victorian parochial church councils’ is accompanied by an attack on the National Association for the Teaching of English as well (in the process getting the name slightly wrong – well, that’s journalists for you). This calls for a separate post, had I but world enough and time….

But Francis Gilbert has written a detailed response, complete with a refutation of his slur on NATE, here.

Michael Gove or Rupert Murdoch: who’s copying the online learning homework?

Michael Gove and Rupert Murdoch express an interest in online learning.

Michael Gove at the BETT Show, 2012
I look into classrooms and they're positively Victorian!
The front page of the Guardian today carried an article by David Leigh about the Secretary of State which included specific reference to the ambitions of Rupert Murdoch to profit from online learning. It’s headlined ‘The schools crusade that links Michael Gove to Rupert Murdoch’. As an aside, Mr Gove, as the author of a book about Islam, might consider the word crusade a little tasteless.1

One interesting passage refers to

…the extraordinarily close links that still exist between publishing tycoon and Tory politician. One of Murdoch’s long-term projects is what he calls a “revolutionary and profitable” move by his media companies into online education. Gove would be a key figure in any attempt to penetrate the British schools market.

And the evidence is:

On 19 May, Gove breakfasted with Murdoch in London. The tycoon flew on from that meeting to address a Paris conference of internet entrepreneurs. This time, he went into some detail about News Corp’s plans for educational technology. He and Klein had been touring educational projects around the world, in South Korea, Sweden and California. Schools were the “last holdout from the digital revolution” he said. “Today’s classroom looks almost exactly the same as it did in the Victorian age… The key is the software.”

You can read the full text of Murdoch’s speech on the News International site.

That’s Mr Murdoch, boys and girls. Now let’s have a look at what Mr Gove said at the BETT Show on 11 January 2012:

The fundamental model of school education is still a teacher talking to a group of pupils. It has barely changed over the centuries, even since Plato established the earliest ‘akademia’ in a shady olive grove in ancient Athens. A Victorian schoolteacher could enter a 21st century classroom and feel completely at home.

Now who do you think is copying the homework, children?

Order Teaching English using ICT from Amazon
As presented to Michael Gove!
Does this suggest a reason for the recent interest by the DfE in technology in schools? In the early days of the coalition, having immediately abolished the education technology agency Becta, it seemed ICT in schools was deemed peripheral at best. Now it seems that Mr Gove is asking, ‘What can technology do for learning?’ The answers in his BETT address are revealing: ‘disseminate learning…. think about how we teach… unprecedented opportunities for assessment’. Well, it’s a start, if a rather limited one – which is why I gave him a copy of our book, Teaching English Using ICT, to show him that English teachers have been thinking about this for a long time already. What’s that? You’d like a copy as well? Oh, all right then….

An open-source curriculum?
In calling for ‘an open-source curriculum’, mind you, Mr Gove might not entirely please his former employer and continued friend Mr Murdoch. For in that same speech to the G-8 Forum in Paris referred to earlier, Rupert Murdoch opened by making a strong plea for copyright law:

We hope the G-8 will strongly affirm that the property rights of artists and creators are more than a matter of protecting cultures. In this new century, they are essential requirements for a dynamic economy and the digital future.

As the Open Source Schools site tells us,

Open source software is software which can be used, modified and improved by anyone and can be redistributed freely.

Such a philosophy might not always sit easily with those who see education as a ‘revolutionary and profitable’ market, might it? And that’s before we get to the purists of the Free Software Foundation. Still, taking open source seriously, using free software and publicly-funded and freely available content might save schools a lot of money, mightn’t it? Now that might be ‘revolutionary and profitable’, though more in the spirit of Paris 1789 or 1968 than G-8 Paris 2011….

Rupert Murdoch, the considerate employer
Mr Gove might feel kindly towards Mr Murdoch for a number of reasons. Weary hacks eking out a living in their drafty garrets might be just a little jealous at two further tid-bits in the Guardian story, which shows that ‘Murdoch in turn was kind to his former employee’:

  • When Mr Gove was a backbench MP, The Times topped up his salary with a £60,000-a-year column. Nice work if you can get it – and something covered here in a blog post last July.
  • Murdoch’s publishing arm, HarperCollins, also gave Mr Gove a book advance in 2004 for a history of an obscure 18th-century politician, Viscount Bolingbroke. ‘Puzzlingly,’ David Leigh writes, ‘the book was never delivered.’ What a fine example to set to the children! Well, Miss, that Mr Gove never did his ‘omework neither!

Film least likely to win an Academy Award?
Still, let’s look on the bright side – the Guardian last weekend carried a cartoon by Stephen Collins on films least likely to win an Academy Award. One was Gove: ‘he was a British public figure, but he had a human side too’ (‘extremely detailed… very long indeed’)

Fanciful? Not for Toby Young! In case you weren’t among the 3.26 million who bought the Sun on Sunday, I’ve read it for you – well the bit where Toby Young waxes lyrical about the Secretary of State:

My bet’s on Gove for PM

Haven’t we heard that somewhere before?

1After all, Michael Gove’s Celsius 7/7, published in 2006, ‘argues that Islamists are waging “total war” against the west, not because of imperialism but because of their root-and-branch rejection of “western values”,’ according to Richard Seymour). I’m afraid that another reviewer found this ‘perfervid pamphlet… remarkably trite’. Harsh words indeed! If you want to judge for yourself, Celsius 7/7 is available from Amazon from only £0.01.

Retail politician? Who’ll buy?

Retail politicians and premiership

Michael Gove, January 2012
Prime Minister? Me? Now there's a thought!
This Thursday’s Thought is raised by an article in the Independent by John Rentoul: what’s a ‘retail politician’? Perhaps, in contrast to a second-hand car salesman, estate agent, etc, someone you’d buy a policy from?

Not, at least, the kind derided by Lear:

Get thee glass eyes;
And, like a scurvy politician, seem
To see the things thou dost not.

Not that it’s stopped The Telegraph using those very words about the current Prime Minister in an article entitled ‘Why shouldn’t David Cameron holiday in Tuscany?‘ (yes, that’s a thought for another Thursday):

They’d conclude that Cameron was just another scurvy politician, posing as a man of the people when, in reality, he’s a well-heeled member of Britain’s plutocratic elite.

Whatever the answer, it seems that Michael Gove ‘is not a retail politician on television’. Ah – so it’s how you look under the studio lights that matters? Still, according to John Rentoul, he still ‘could be prime minister’.

Now there’s a thought!

Kitchen cabinet feeling the heat: or, is Michael Gove worth less than a bag of washed vegetables?

Is an hour of the Secretary of State for Education’s time less valuable than sixty minutes at the vegetable washing plant? Or, to put it more topically, is Rupert Murdoch ‘drawing Michael Gove into the News International phone hacking scandal?’ That’s the shocking implication of this recent blog post on the Local Schools Network:

Will Michael Gove also be drawn into the sleaze? In 2009, the Conservatives published a list of shadow cabinet ministers’ outside interests. News International were very generous to him, paying £5,000 a month for his services as journalist for one hour a week. That’s £1,250 a week.

It’s not just £1,250 a week – it’s £1,250 an hour, which seems pretty generous pay for a hack. (Hack is used here, of course, as quaint Fleet Street argot for journalist and not implying someone who hacks into phones – though it now seems that in News International these were too often, alas, one and the same person.) Whilst some may take this as a sign that most of us are undervaluing our services to the public by selling them so cheaply, it could be that it’s still not enough for Mr Gove. As an earlier post revealed, Conservative MP Andrew Bridgen is paid £1295.50 an hour as non-executive chairman of a company selling pre-washed vegetables. Surely as a world-class journalist for world-class schools he deserved more?

A more cynical view emerges, predictably, from another (no doubt jealous) journalist. Tom Clark writes in the Guardian that the Prime Minister:

tried to imply an equivalence between Coulson [Cameron’s disgraced communications director] and Miliband’s own press chief, Tom Baldwin, simply because the latter used to write for the NI-owned Times.

So if, in Tom Clark’s words, the Leader of the Opposition ‘has turned up the heat’ on ‘members of the prime minister’s kitchen cabinet’, where does that leave members of the actual cabinet who have taken Mr Murdoch’s shilling (rather a lot of them, too)?

Frock ‘literally taken off’ on High Street? What will chaps and chapesses think?

Yesterday’s Guardian featured some worn out words: ‘expressions that have become such clichés that they have lost all meaning’. Aphorist James Geary nominated literally:

Why? One of the great testaments to the power of metaphor, and the malleability of language, is the metaphorical use of the word “literally”…. It’s a worn-out word, though, because it prevents people from thinking up a fresh metaphor for whatever it is they want to describe.

Geary points out, with the kind of detail that lends fascination to the humblest word, that literal

is derived from the Latin verb linire, meaning “to smear”, and was transferred to litera (letter) when authors began smearing words on parchment instead of carving them into wood or stone. Thus, the literal meaning of “literal” is to smear or spread, a fitting metaphor for the way metaphor oozes over rigid linguistic borders.’

Literally was perhaps not so fitting for an item in Glossop Life, ‘a lifestyle magazine for Glossop and the High Peak’ that also dropped through my letterbox yesterday:

Based at the top end of the High Street, her shop is very visible and has literally taken off.’

Sonia’s shop is called Frock – but I’m not sure Glossop is quite ready for a frock to be literally taken off on the High Street. What will chaps and chapesses think?

Chaps? The word has surfaced in two interesting contexts this week. In the Telegraph John Newton (no, not the reformed slave-trader who’s been featured in Word of the Day this week, but the Headmaster of Taunton School) told Michael Gove that he should axe A-level modular exams. Presumably once he’s sorted the teachers’ pensions out – and incidentally, what about MPs sorting out their own rather generous pension arrangements first? Dr Newton praises terminal tests:

You get one chance. That was it. Sorry old chap.

‘Old chap?’ So it’s only the boys at Taunton School who take exams – or perhaps only the boys who fail them? It seems rather a jocular term for the learned doctor (and the Telegraph) to be using for, as the OED says, chap is colloquial – and for young males:

‘Customer’, fellow, lad. (Todd, in 1818, said ‘it usually designates a person of whom a contemptuous opinion is entertained’; but it is now merely familiar and non-dignified, being chiefly applied to a young man.)

It seems this kind of ‘non-dignified’ language is heard not only in the Headmasters’ studies of the more select public (or private) schools but also in the higher echelons of the Civil Service, for on the front page of today’s Guardian we can read an email from an ‘official at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’, whose name, sadly, has been redacted, drawing up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident:

We need to ensure the anti-nuclear chaps and chapesses do not gain ground on this.

Surely a bit too jocular for such a topic, old chap? (Am I right to think that only a chap would write this?) At least it indicates that the chaps wear the trousers (well, not always literally, of course) and a certain sort of chap was being rather too familiar with the nuclear industry.

O Telegraph, o mores!

Typos, Spider-man (or the Bible?) and photographs (flattering and otherwise)

Michael Gove's new photo in the Telegraph
Flattering for Mr Gove: but not for the Telegraph, for all the mortar boards on view
The Telegraph has now found a much more flattering photograph of the Education Secretary – but its proofreading has, alas, not improved since (with sorrow) we drew attention to its deficiencies some time ago here and here. There has also been some debate amongst the anguished (but usually polite) commenters on the Telegraph site about the quotation: is it a turkey, is it Spider-man or is it the Bible? Meanwhile, Steve Bell seizes on the image to portray the Education Secretary as a mortarboarded Spider-man in today’s Guardian.

Not far below the warmly lit portrait of a cloistered Michael Gove we read:
Telegraph typo 25 June 2011
Oh dear – and this in the paper of Simon Heffer. As if that weren’t bad enough, the awkwardly worded quotation came in for scrutiny. Telegraph_Reader wrote:

Perhaps Gove was being purposefully daft, but I think the quote is actually from the Bible, or a paraphrase thereof. A quick google suggests I am probably thinking of Luke 12.48:
From everyone to whom much has been given, much will be required; and from the one to whom much has been entrusted, even more will be demanded.’

Purposefully daft or not (perish the thought!), Mr Gove (or his clever-ironic speech writer) would seem to have been thinking of the final lines of the film of Spider-man:

Peter Parker: [voiceover] Whatever life holds in store for me, I will never forget these words: “With great power comes great responsibility.” This is my gift, my curse. Who am I? I’m Spider-man.

Perhaps the conversation next day in the Department went something like this:

Mr Gove, you read English at University – please tell us who found that quotation for you and we’ll sack them. And we’ll have at word with the Telegraph to make sure they send the intern who checked the story back to her parents in the Home Counties.
Goodness, those Telegraph readers know too much! I was just trying to inject a little wit and a populist touch for the journalists and to amuse the Headmasters – not easy, you know, an assembly of Beaks can be quite scary!
Yes Minister – sorry, Secretary of State – but someone’s pointed out it’s rather like the parable of the talents in the Bible. Possibly uncomfortable reading, that book; you know: ‘Blessed are the poor, the meek shall inherit….’
No, stop – meek, that’s just right! I’ve just reminded teachers they should meekly accept paying more and working longer for reduced pensions! And look: even today’s Guardian approves of my style: ‘Striking rhetoric from Michael Gove‘.
Ah yes, sir, but I suspect that may also be the rhetorical device of irony – or just an old-fashioned Guardian pun. And I fear Steve Bell is now drawing you as some kind of cross between Spider-man, a bat and Mr Gradgrind. I’m not sure the PM will see this as good PR, as he’s wont to say.

‘Well read is well bred’ – but Telegraph overcooks the books (again)

The Telegraph cooks the books again and Headmaster over-eggs the pudding.

Cookery books
Nourishing the soul or the body?

An education that does not provide the tools and the hunger to read beyond the narrow confines of a subject is, in the wider sense, no education at all.

John Newton, Headmaster of the independent (yet also public) Taunton School, fears that students’ literary diet is as bad as the convenience foods too many of them eat. Writing in The Telegraph this week, he adds that ‘current students are no longer inclined to read tougher texts; they are encouraged to read what takes their fancy rather than what nourishes the soul’. The sub-editor seems taken by this culinary metaphor, for the article is illustrated by a photograph of old cookery books. The same books in fact, including (the no longer very) Modern Cookery that illustrated the report, back in March, of Michael Gove’s 50-book challenge to students – and noted here at the time as a rather odd choice of image. Still, who are we to argue with the illustrious ones of the Telegraph and the noble Doctor Newton (no mere ‘Headteacher’ he)? So I’ve used the same image too – I’m sure they won’t mind, it keeps costs down for everyone.

It does nonetheless strike me that the Head is over-egging the pudding when he goes on to write:

The arts have always been an area where the mind should run free within proper limits. Now candidates work like automata. We are seeing the persecution of the independent learner; the reader who imbibes a range of classic texts simply because they are beautiful in themselves is a rare species.

Ah, the pursuit of beauty! How exotic – but, of course, only ‘within proper limits’. Who (even in North Korea) could disagree with that? Especially when we read his approving comments on the International Baccalaureate and the Pre-U, very largely taken by independent schools, where (of course) students ‘enjoy an education which leads to a fulfilled appreciation of what great minds have produced’. No doubt Michael Gove will soon share with us his own list of the works by great minds that all students should read. Except, of course, when they are roaming free, reading round the subject and seeking out fresh culinary delights in Modern Cookery.

(The alert reader will have noticed that I have eschewed the hyphen in ‘overcook’ but used it in ‘over-egg’. Pussyfooting again….)

Sarkozy, syncope, The Princess of Clevès and the Beano Annual

Who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or would we rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

Thursday’s Thought: Sarkozy’s syncope

Beano Annual 2011
Only 49 more books to go...

This Thursday’s Thought from Word of the Day was stimulated by an article by Hélène Cixous in the Guardian’s series on France. Hélène Cixous is one of those French intellectuals who fill many Anglo-Saxons with a mixture of terror and mockery, ‘known,’ it says in her biography at the European Graduate School, ‘for her experimental writing style, which crosses the traditional limits of academic discourse into poetic language. Her practice crosses many discourses, and she is admired for her role as an influential theorist, as well as a novelist and playwright.’ Her target is Nicolas Sarkozy‘s philistinism, manifested in his syncope:

Pushing syncope to the limit, he swallows half the syllables and he spits the rest in his opponent’s face. He imposes his idiolect on the world. Only he ‘speaks’ this idiom; only stand-up comedians imitate it. Language gets a hammering from him. Upon its ruins he proclaims the disgrace of culture and the reign of ignorance.

His especial crime in her eyes is his contempt for The Princess of Clevès:

Just imagine an English potentate breaking the good news to the people: a ban on bloody tedious Robinson Crusoe, cluttering the mind. And Shakespeare, what a drag! Old stuff. We’ve got the telly now.

The Beano annual – and 49 other books

O blessed Anglo-Saxons! For have we not Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education and single-handed saviour of our nation’s culture? Lo, hear him proclaim that children should read fifty books a year. No matter that distinguished authors have expressed their ‘outrage at the “great big contradiction” of Mr Gove’s claim to wish to improve literacy while closing libraries across the country,’ they still tell the Independent what they’d include in their fifty. I love it that Michael Rosen’s final choice is the Beano Annual: ‘a cornucopia of nutty, bad, silly ideas, tricks, situations and plots.’ Just the place for Mr Gove to find his next wheeze for schools?

Who invented the novel?

Never mind that the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge rubbishes his ideas for that subject in the London Review of Books, what would Michael (English, Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford) make of Hélène Cixous’ claim that ‘The Princess of Clevès is the first novel in literature’? (‘Worse,’ she adds, ‘it’s written by a woman (Madame de La Fayette). Worse, it immortalises a woman.’) Blinkered Anglocentric that I am, I’d believed we invented the novel – I even have a volume from my own university days confidently titled Shorter Novels: Elizabethan (Deloney, Greene and Nashe: expect them in the new National Curriculum). Fortunately, Ian Watt comes to our rescue, having firmly put the French in their place back in 1957 in The Rise Of The Novel:

It is perhaps partly for this reason that French fiction from La Princesse de Clèves to Les Liaisons dangereuses stands outside the main tradition of the novel. For all its psychological penetration and literary skill, we feel it is too stylish to be authentic. In this Madame de La Fayette and Choderlos de Laclos are the polar opposites of Defoe and Richardson, whose very diffuseness tends to act as a guarantee of the authenticity of their report, whose prose aims exclusively at what Locke defined as the proper purpose of language, ‘to convey the knowledge of things’, and whose novels as a whole pretend to be no more than a transcription of real life – in Flaubert’s words, ‘le réel écrit‘.

How masterly the put-down! ‘The French? Too stylish! But of course, their President is so philistine!’ For something less stylish but more topical, we turn to Mrs Cameron’s diary in today’s Guardian on why war, especially alongside the French, is so tedious:

Obama did not man up until Dave set an example and the maddening part was he had to man up with Sarko who is such a ghastly little squit and only doing it to impress Carla, pathetic. But there are pluses because next to Sarko Dave looks so buff that tbh you feel sorry for Carla having such a weird little husband even if he is a president.

Now what was the thought?

Ah yes, who got to the novel first: the French or the English? Or was it whether we’d rather have the curriculum at the mercy of Mr Gove or President Sarkozy?

War on language? Or cooking the books?

Some minor skirmishes and broken shins on the field of language: Cicero, Wittgenstein, Kant and marketeers.

Michael Gove
Mr Gove - or...

Cookery books
...cookery books? See below....

Steve Bell in today’s Guardian comments on the confusion about whether Gaddafi is a ‘target’ in the current action over Libya. I’ll leave that to the commentariat and offer instead a few minor skirmishes on the fringes of the linguistic battlefield:

  • A new quango limps into life Yesterday, the recruitment site for the Standards and Testing Agency Executive had ‘Lorem Ipsum… Find out more’ on its home page; sadly, they’ve now corrected this charming touch, thereby removing what, I have been fascinated to discover, is a (kind of) quotation from Cicero: ‘Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself’. (Rhetoric again: there seem at present to be plenty of people anxious to pursue pain – oh, wait a minute, it’s the poor what get the pain.) This quango is, after all, supposed to be about standards….
  • Labeling and gaming Yesterday’s print edition of the Media Guardian had an advertisement from the Marketing Agencies Association headed ‘Life’s a game that marketers need to start playing’. The call-out quotation spelt labeled the American way: is that what marketers do, or this part of the war on language? Of course, the marketing people haven’t found anything new; as Ludwig Wittgenstein said many years ago, language is a game of two halves.
  • Brave marketeers Talking of alternative spellings, marketers are sometimes called marketeers, which makes them sound rather brave, dashing and – by association with buccaneers and privateers – also cavalier, irresponsible and untrustworthy. Thanks, as ever, to the OED, I learn that marketeer goes back to least 1665. It also helpfully tells me that ‘in many of the words so formed there is a more or less contemptuous implication, as in crotcheteer, garreteer, pamphleteer, pulpiteer, sonneteer.’
  • Pure Kant? In Sunday’s Observer Christopher Bray provides an upmarket example of the put-down rhetorical question:

    Kant isn’t much fun either, of course, but which of us would deny the certainty-subverting genius of the “first critique”?

    Come on, hands up: which of us?

  • Cooking the books? One from the literature front: today’s Telegraph reports Michael Gove’s latest wheeze: ‘pupils should read 50 books a year’. Splendid! But why did the paper choose to illustrate this with an image of old cookery books, one ironically titled Modern Cookery? Is Mikey cooking the books again? Does he want a generation of cooks and scullery maids? The Secretary of State himself appears on a second version of this same story on the Telegraph website, pulling that face of his (‘Yes, this is a bit of joke, but what larks!’). He’s not actually holding any books either, just a clutch of files – probably containing cunning plans to take us forward to the age of Nigel Molesworth. It seems the Telegraph marketeers are intent on gaming with their content.