The neatest phrasemaking of the week came last night on Channel 4 news from Daniel Finkelstein of The Times, commenting on the difficulties facing Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister, he said, is now reduced to the Travolta-Micawber Formula: staying alive in the hope that something will turn up. And Finkelstein had the generosity to acknowledge […]

Arnold Schwarzenegger has suggested that immigrants to the United States should watch only English-language TV so that they can understand the language and news of their home state.
  On the contrary, argues Joe Mathews in a piece in the Washington Post this week: political leaders should be encouraging Americans to switch off English-language TV and […]

Dr Bernard Lamb, a tutor at Imperial College London, was so shocked by the poor spelling, punctuation and grammar of the students on his genetics course that he started logging their mistakes. According to The Observer, he plans to publish them in the journal of the Queen’s English Society.
  I understand how he feels. I […]