'Tis a Pity She's a Whore, Zizou'

This blog started last year with a few words on the Zidane-Materazzi incident and Seanachie was firmly on the side of Zidane - even if he could see the obvious logic behind Materazzi's unlovely act. Now the Inter thug has disclosed his exact words of July 11th last year to the world and they are, in translation, at least, curiously Shakespearean. 'I prefer the whore that is your sister', is what he confided to TV Sorrisi e Canzoni magazine. It may simply be a quirk of the English language but it is a difficult phrase to translate without sounding quaintly archaic - it might also be rendered as 'I prefer the whore that your sister is' - or Irish; perhaps what Marco meant was 'I prefer your sister, whore that she is'. In any case, the words seem worthy of a Tybalt of fair Verona or one of the Italian villains of John Webster or John Ford's Jacobean Revenge tragedies. 'Tis a pity she's a whore, Zizou'. Perhaps Zidane should simply have swallowed his pride, bit his thumb at the dastard and reserved punishment by bastinado until after his retirement.

How to Identify the Research Potential of Innovative Work in the Field of Cutting and Pasting

I've been overworked, out of time, fagged out, in the wrong place at the wrong time, too busy, lazy, fit only for Facebook, reading about the Holocaust etc. So apologies in advance for cutting and pasting from a great letter in today's Irish Times - an organ I tend to reserve an inordinate amount of scorn for:

LITERACY AND GOBBLEDEGOOK

Madam, - Your report of the launch of the Adult Literacy Awards quotes Inez Baily, director of the National Adult Literacy Agency, as saying: "The awards were designed to encourage organisations to identify the research potential of their innovative work and recognise, share and learn from the work being done by others in the field" (The Irish Times, August 14th).

Madam, this is gobbledegook on stilts. Such vernacular vandalism, spouted by an organisation such as NALA which is charged with helping the 1 million Irish adults who are functionally illiterate, is mind-boggling.

Furthermore, in 2005 NALA launched its Plain English Mark. This is awarded to organisations which are committed to clear communication. Is it not time that NALA and its director employed the same standard of English that it demands from other organisations? - Yours, etc,

MICHAEL O'DONNELL, Old Youghal Road, Cork.

Michael O'Donnell of Old Youghal Road in Cork, you're on the button there. Literacy - especially in a country with rates of functional literacy far behind many developing countries - is far too important a thing to be left to the sub-literate to administer. I promise to be more pro-active tomorrow. I'm only working one job for the next few days, you know.

Might is Right

One of my regular haunts takes the Financial Times on Saturdays, which is a bit unusual as it is a bar with a mainly French-speaking clientele. I had always scorned the FT on the grounds that I imagined it to be a capitalist rag but over the past few years I have come to realise it is the best newspaper in the UK along with the Guardian. In fact at times it is even better than the Grauniad because there is less predictability in both its editorial line and in most of the copy published. As well as carrying that superlative football writer Simon Kuper (a neighbour of mine and with whom I played Saturday morning football until laziness and apathy sunk their claws in), it also has excellent film and arts coverage, not to mention their coverage of current affairs. The week before last there was a brilliant lengthy article by their Jerusalem bureau chief Harvey Morris on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War and the Saturday Arts & Weekend supplement this week had this lovely piece by Harry Eyres on the decline of the use of the word 'might' in British official discourse, and the unsuitability of 'may' to fill the gap as many people intend it to. The site needs registration but it is worth taking the 15-day free option to have a look around.

A Wordie In Your Ear

Seanachie, in a particularly slothful mood, will catch a ride on the back of Eamonn Fitzgerald's always-entertaining, if politically-outré Rainy Day blog for his next post, which concerns a wonderful invention that is but two weeks old, namely Wordie, a web resource conceived and launched over Thanksgiving weekend. The concept is for users to post their favourite words, 'like flickr but without photos' and there are links to other lexicons on the web, including a wonderful visual thesaurus. This is great fun and is yet another of those brilliant web inventions to which one can lose half one's life. The hell with it, sometimes the www is more fun than real life. Limerick neocon Eamonn has an interview with Wordie creator John McGrath on his blog. Meanwhile among Seanachie's postings so far are 'afflatus', 'phalanx', 'comestible', 'gobshite', 'muppet', 'overhead' and Geoffrey Chaucer's beloved obscenity, 'cunt'. If you are offended, you should be.