In response to the Daily Mail's war on internet freedom, I have decided to launch my own war on.....

....the Daily Mail and the Mail Online's appalling standards of journalism and in particular their abysmal standard of English grammar. And to begin with an item clearly designed to put me off my lunch:

The ignorant and singularly inappropriately named Sam Webb continues in this preposterous vein;
A lump of fat the size of a double decker bus has been discovered clogging a London sewer.

The Fatberg, described as 15 tonnes of festering food mixed with wet wipes and a host of other disgusting ephemera, was found blocking pipes under Kingston in south London.
The revolting mass caused sewage flows through the pipes to be reduced to five per cent of normal capacity and was created by people pouring cooking oils down the drain and flushing sanitary products.

For the education of Sam Webb I feel obliged to point out that ephemera is derived from Greek and refers to written or printed matter not meant to be retained or preserved i.e. not intended to last more than a day.
While I am quite certain that no one intended the blockage to last more than a day, I am equally certain that Sam Webb did not intend to suggest that the material causing the blockage consisted of printed matter.
Just plain ignorance then!

When is a penthouse not a penthouse?

When it's a houseboat of course!

In one of it's increasingly stupid pseudo articles, the Mail Online is advertising this converted barge in Battersea as a 'penthouse' apartment. But I suppose nobody is going to bother even reading an advertisement under a heading which advertises a houseboat for an asking price of £1.7 million. But the lack of imagination shown by the copywriters does not excuse the ignorance.
I would not spend that sort of money with an estate agent who did not know the difference between a penthouse and a houseboat. Would you?

J K Rowling's grasp of the English language has always been tenuous at best.

And now she has demonstrated her limited abilities on national television.

Yesterday morning we were treated to a fawning interview of her by the staggeringly ugly Will Gompertz, the BBC's arts correspondent, to mark the publication of her first adult book.

During the interview the gruesome Gompertz asked her if she would ever do another Harry Potter book. She replied that she might do a "director's cut" of a couple of them. Well, you silly woman, an original book is already a director's cut ipso facto, because the director (i.e. the author) wrote it in the first place.

I will not be rushing out to buy a copy of "The Casual Vacancy" because her standard of English is so poor that it would only make my hypertension even worse that it is now.

And speaking of making my hypertension worse; I would ask the BBC to not show the slimy Will Gompertz in any item on early morning TV as he makes my teeth curl up and stand on edge. Having Susanna Reid's eyes staring at me from her end of the Breakfast TV sofa is quite bad enough without my mouth feeling like it is chewing on a lemon too. Keep Gompertz on voice over duties ONLY please.

I suppose you might think that this is just an excuse for me to be rude about the celebrity I hate most in the world

Well it's not, in spite of her utterly odious attempt to invite comparisons to the beautiful Julie Christie.

I'm actually having yet another go at the vile standard of English in the Mail Online.

Introducing this article featuring the abominable Chelseeeee Healey dressed, in August, for the depths of a Moscow winter, the Mail journalist Kirsty McCormack says

She's not necessarily known for having the best fashion taste

What, in the name of all that's holy, does not necessarily known mean in this context?

not necessarily - as opposed to what? I don't get it. What purpose does it serve and how does it add meaning?
If she meant not known for having the best fashion taste then why couldn't she just have said so instead of giving me a headache trying to unravel her syntax.

Chelseeeeee is also well known for her:
1) Ghastly eyebrows.
2) Plastic mammary hyperplasia.
3) Trout pout.
4) Poor elocution and diction.
5) Limited vocabulary.
6) Lack of acting ability.

The Mail Online sinks even further into the depths of illiteracy

You may well think that with so much madness and sadness in the world my priorities are a trifle askew. Well maybe.

The truth is that I do feel rather depressed and I find a picture of Rihanna often cheers me up especially when I can combine it with one of my favourite hobbyhorses.

The pic above shows the ever sexy and sultry Rihanna leaving a business meeting in Los Angeles with, what the Mail Online described as:

what looked to be a binded press pack in hand

Since when, in the name of the wee man, has the past tense of the verb to bind become binded

It's not even an Americanism so it can't be blamed on copy/pasting from a foreign source.
And what really puzzles me is that if the author had a moment's hesitation about the correctness of his word he could have simply omitted it altogether without losing any of the sense. So I guess it comes down to sheer stupidity as much as ignorance on the part of the author who, it turns out, is something called Fehintola Betiku.

What on earth is a Fehintola Betiku? You cannot tell whether it is male or female let alone whether it might speak English as a first or second language.
I know I've said it before, but if the Daily Mail cannot afford to pay educated journalists then it has an obligation to employ a decent proof reader at the very least.

The Olympic games seem to be just an excuse for the linguistically challenged to overuse the word AMAZING

Can we get something straight: Amazing is something that leaves you with your mouth open, goggle eyed and stunned with no words to describe what you have just witnessed. Therefore it should really only be used when no other words will do. To use it otherwise is to devalue the word and leave you with nothing appropriate to say when events have truly been amazing
Amazing is, for example; walking on the moon, the view of earth from space, some of the feats by Victoria Cross winners during wartime, some of the rescues performed by lifeboat crews.
You get the point? Sights and exploration at the furthest end of the spectrum of human ability. Exceptional deeds when one's own life is in peril. And so on.
Athletes and the Olympic games are NOT amazing. Pop singers and bands are NOT amazing. Your boyfriends and girls are NOT amazing. Your noisome and lice ridden children are NOT amazing. NEITHER TV programmes NOR films are amazing.
I am utterly sick of the excessive and frivolous use of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary lists about half a million words in the English language so why not get a copy and use some of them before amazing becomes utterly meaningless and I die of an apoplectic seizure.

I'm happy to admit that I don't like Jamie Oliver

Like all other celebrity chefs he's so precious about food and cooking - wonderful cabbage, super sprouts and so on - for god's sake they're just vegetables. But Jamie in particular has such poor diction, bad grammar and limited vocabulary that he gets on my wick before he even cooks anything. If you can bear it, try counting the number of times he says "amazing" in half an hour.
So you can imagine that my interest in his wife Jools' revelations in the press this week that she checks his texts, emails and phone for signs of infidelity, has caused me little more than a snigger. And that only because I really cannot imagine Jamie being the cause of much lust in the female population as a whole.
It wasn't until the Mail Online published the names of his children that I sat up and took any interest whatsoever.
They are: Poppy Honey, Daisy Boo, Petal Blossom, and Buddy Bear. Aside from being extremely sorry for any children inflicted by names like these, I'm quite willing to bet that Jamie and Jools frequently talk to each other in babyish language too.
It occurs to me that couples who resort to such a means of communication with each other are trying, by a personal code, to demonstrate that they still have something in common with each other in spite of evidence to the contrary.
So maybe Jools really does have something to worry about. I'll be keeping an eye open for news of the inevitable break up.

Disappointing BBC coverage of the Jubilee River Pageant

I had been really looking forward to an afternoon watching the coverage of the Jubilee River Pageant. Of course I would have given my eye teeth to be there but I couldn't so that was it. I had a sense of forboding when I saw that the scheduled commentators was to include Matt Baker, a man who is unable to speak or pronounce English correctly, and Sophie Raworth whose news broadcasts have all the fluidity of a stroke victim. But, I told myself, surely it could not be that bad. It is the Beeb after all and not Sky! How wrong could I possibly be? The BBC coverage was as dismal as the weather.
I had forgotten the Beeb's policy of trivialising anything to do with the Monarchy.
From the second I heard someone refer to the Queen as Her Royal Highness, I knew it was all going to go horribly wrong.
And sure enough Matt Baker started off with his usual brand of regional English which denies the existence of the letter G in the endings of present participles and gerunds. While Sophie Raworth, who could trivialise anything into non existence, prattled on with gems such as:
"Oh look, my 70 yr old dad is in there somewhere!" Completely ignoring a barge overflowing with Royals and other dignitaries floating past on the river.
Other low points included;
Tess Daly prancing about with a strange hair piece vaguely resembling a pineapple perched on her head.
Something about some people doing some really rubbish painting. In the rain for God's sake!
Somebody wiffling about sandwiches and picnic snacks. Why do celebrity chefs have to be dragged into everything nowadays?
Richard E Grant talking to the embarrassing John Sargent about his Union Jack socks and underwear. WHY?
Fearne Cotton doing something pointless and utterly irrelevant in sparkly shoes.

This was an event that is unlikely ever to be repeated and the whole significance and description of the spectacle was missed entirely.
I only heard one historically significant event mentioned and that was the fact that Anne Boleyn came by river for both her wedding and execution. Was that really the best they could do from hundreds of years of history?

One question which intrigued me was that of the underuse of the rather magnificent replica royal barge Glorianna (below).

Why wasn't Her Majesty on board this splendid craft instead of that motorised tin bath? We weren't told. Maybe it was a matter of security or safety. I could understand that but I'd have liked to have been be told. I admit that the handling of the tin bath was accomplished with skilful aplomb and was a joy to watch but even so!
This was an event that took several years to plan and it was executed magnificently in spite of the dire weather. But it took the BBC only a few hours to make it ruin it with puerile rubbish and a Blue Peter level of commentary.
The BBC ought to be utterly ashamed of itself.

What is it with this increasing use of reflexive pronouns

I've just heard on #bbcnews that ambassador for English grammar, David Beckham, squeakily proclaiming that;

If I were to be asked to be a torch bearer or something, it would be a huge honour for myself (???).

Why is me being replaced by myself so often nowadays? I don't think it's an American thing.

You might think there is nothing in this for me to get annoyed about.

After all, it's just a simple feature in the Daily Mail about my favourite Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton attending a film premier with Nicole Scherzinger. We can skip the bit where I explain why I think Nicole is so unsuitable for Lewis. After all if he's happy, he drives better and makes me happy too.

So we'll also skip the pics where Nicole proves that she cannot walk down a few steps without making making an exhibition of herself, whether accidentally or on purpose. No, we'll move on to where the Mail reporter decribes the incident of the split skirt and the steps:

I hate split infinitives especially where they make the sentence look ugly and clumsy. How much trouble would it have been to put: "she attempted to descend elegantly" instead? It looks better and doesn't break that basic rule of English grammar.

Talking of looking better and basic rules I couldn't help noticing that Lewis was wearing a wing collar with a conventional long tie instead of a bow tie which would have been more usual.

Yet another schoolboy error in Daily Mail headline

If I were to make a post everytime I found an easily avoidable error such as this in the Daily Mail's headlines it would become a full time job. We all make typing errors but a simple re-reading usually gives the opportunity to make corrections. And that may well be the problem at the Daily Mail. There is nobody checking copy before it gets published. Of course if the journalists had anything more than a rudimentary knowledge of written English such problems might not be so prevalent.

Here then for the benefit of this headline writer (do they still have them?) is my guide to the relevant use of the third-person, singular neuter pronoun, it. Its, as written here, is the possessive form - though in this sentence nothing is possessed. Since its here could be written in full as it is, there should be an apostrophe standing in for the missing i thus; it's.