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It’s a bad week to be a Conservative politician.  Someone allegedly called the grass-roots anti-Europe movement a bunch of ‘swivel-eyed loons’.

Isn’t that wonderful?  Not that the Conservative Party are imploding – once more – on Europe – that will depend entirely on your political leanings –but what a great insult.  It sounds a lot like Shakespeare’s ‘cream-faced loon’ – and if you’re feeling Shakespearean today – why not try to generate your own archaic sounding insults?

On the other hot topic that appears to be dividing politicians, have you seen the very funny speech by a New Zealand MP on gay marriage?  It’s a beautiful example of how to turn your opponent’s words against them.

What examples of interesting or funny speech have you come across in the public arena recently?

Are you having a procrastinating Monday?  Why not try this game - the aim is to space the letters in each word correctly for the typeface.

And it only goes through ten different words so there's still plenty of time to do some writing today!

Cressida
(Editorial Consultant)

PS to 'Kern' is to adjust spacing and characters in a piece of

Reading Alex Clark’s Guardian piece last week on the Lost Art of Editing, author and long-serving publishing personality Carmen Callil’s derogatory comments on the role played by editors may have incensed me if her logic weren’t so painfully narrow. Let’s go through her ‘argument’:

i)  The general gist of Miss Callil’s opinion seems to be that the editor’s function was to stroke the author’s ego, a superfluous act fuelled by some old-fashioned nonsense about ‘relationship’ no doubt [Miss Callil’s inference here, I stress]

Author Miss Callil’s ego clearly doesn’t need more stroking hence her disregard for the role of Editor. No, give her a great copy-editor for a quick spell check and she’s practically good to go. After that, all she needs is a sales and marketing department to promote and deify her.

In her argument, there is no sense of the largeness that opening up your work to another perspective entails and demands. An editor advises …