I suppose you have noticed as I have that a number of well respected publications employ well paid writers to pontificate about anything no matter how trivial as long as it is thought to be clever, witty, erudite and compelling. Two such articles came to my notice today, that is I read them having found them by flicking over the pages of the October Spectator.
The first by someone who calls herself Dot Wordsworth , a not so clever nom de plume, I surmise, wrote about a new word that she had coined to describe her slothful ( or idle, work shy, indolent) husband. It was lol-poop. She apparently found it in a 17th C book that she had ‘inexplicably over looked’ in her reading. How many of us could make the same claim I wondered. She then goes on to explore the source of the word no doubt with the help of one or more research assistants, who you guessed, are members of her family currently highly educated but yet not gainfully employed, thus ‘keeping it in the family’
She offers a number of possible sources and in the process tells us about liripoop a word that trips lightly off the tongue and is I am sure in regular usage in the popular press. It turns out to mean --the elongated tail of an academics gown- of course you knew that.
In the end of this piece she confesses that despite the erudition of those who have tried to identify its source, no certain origin was found.
The other article to which my attention was drawn was written by Hugo Rifkind, a name that suggests some connection with a well known UK political figure. Nepotism you may ask -who knows? Certainly the piece falls into the category of nonsense. Entitled -‘All I ask for is coherence of abuse’ he goes on to itemize features of his life - Such things as his ownership of an Oyster card, a bicycle etc. Are you making any sense of this? Objects that separate him from the less well off, and that he should be ashamed of-
He cant resist the question of University fees, commenting that is it the rich or the poor who will be penalised? The piece is written during the recent successful rescue of the Chilean miners. He tells us proudly that he once went down a mine so have I, so what? He found to his surprise that it was hot. Didn’t he do Earth sciences at school? The nearer you get to the centre the hotter it gets.
The final parody is when he attempts to show that there are worse thing that can happens to us than being buried underground for more than two weeks without any contact and or any hope of rescue. It is difficult to imagine anything worse. The uncertainty itself would be almost unbearable.
470 words
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