Scrapbook for April

21.04.2026 – More pedantry

The American poet Ezra Pound frequently asserted that when the use of language decays, civilisation decays, too.

That's a bit sweeping, even for me, but every day we read and hear examples of the barbaric use of English language in the Anglosphere.

The English of the underclass has always been mangled. There is no evidence that this will ever change. Last year we spent some time with Tolkien's garrulous trolls from The Hobbit, speaking what the Oxford Professor of Anglo-Saxon conceived as the language used by the roughnecks of the lower orders in England. No one is shocked by Tolkien's literary blackface: we expect the ill-educated lower orders to mangle English – that is their defining characteristic.

But in the long history of the language the mangling was heard in the pub, at the bus stop or, in Chaucer's case, on the pilgrimage to Canterbury – in other words, wherever normal, uneducated people congregated. Nowadays thousands mangle English to their millions of readers, listeners and viewers via social media.

But as we ascend to the great and the good of the state that governs us, we should expect better. In this rarified region, the careful and precise use of English starts to matter. In the USA we hear or read politicians and journalists telling us again and again that some aspect or other of the Iranian regime has been 'decimated'. The campaign to rescue 'decimate' from misuse as a fancy word for 'destroyed' has been going on for well over half a century to my knowledge. But, einmal ist der Wurm drin, 'once the worm is inside', say the Germans – who know about such things – the end is inevitable.

At the very beginning of this month we had some fun with Morgan McSweeney and his 'robbed phone'. I accept that the correct use of the verb 'rob' is hardly the language hill we should choose to die on, but it is a signal that Mr. McSweeney's grasp of English is not of the Rolls-Royce standard.

With this in mind, today I stumbled across a statement written by that very elevated person (The Right Honourable) Lord (Simon) Case, the former Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service, giving his elevated advice to the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, on the proposed appointment of Lord (Peter) Mandelson to the elevated position of Ambassador to the United States of America. Case submitted something called a 'box note' (me neither) to Starmer, describing how this appointment should be managed:

If this is the route that you wish to take, you should give us the name of the person you would like to appoint and we will develop a plan for them to acquire the necessary security clearances and do due diligence on any potential conflicts of interest or other issues of which you should be aware before confirming your choice.

If this sixty-one word rambling sentence is what passes for sagacity among the great and the good, Britain really is circling the cultural drain.

Case could not have been more eager to show himself willing to do his master's bidding. He has wrapped what is a clear, legally required process into the soft cotton wool of wish-fulfilment: 'acquire the necessary security clearances', 'should be aware', 'confirming your choice'. In the light of this waffle, it is no surprise that the political establishment in Britain is now in uproar over Mandelson's appointment and subsequent precipitate fall from grace.

I have marked in bold the phrases that you should consider closely, but to spare us all a lot of pedantry, here is the note written in clear English:

Please give us the name of the person you wish to appoint so that he or she can undergo the customary legal process for such appointments, which will include a thorough security vetting and an examination of any possible conflicts of interest. All this must be done before you announce your choice.

Had Case written that, everyone would have been spared a lot of uproar and, more importantly, the grotesque sleazebag Mandelson would have remained in deserved obscurity. As the denizens of social media would have formulated Case's advice: 'WTF are you thinking of, hiring that [expletive deleted (©Richard Nixon)]?'

Coda

Tying some strings together, we learn today from testimony in the Parliamentary hearing on the Mandelson affair, that it was none other than Morgan McSweeney who at one point telephoned the then Head of the Foreign Office civil service, Sir Phillip Barton, to tell him to 'just fucking approve' Mandelson's appointment. From what we know of McSweeney's command of English, that sounds about right.

16.04.2026 – Welsh choirboy

This a a mugshot of the 'Welsh choirboy' who carried out the frenzied knife attack on the girls' dance party in Southport last year. We are told that the parents must take some of the blame for his behaviour because of their role in protecting and/or enabling him.

Personally, having to look at this thing over the Weetabix every morning would make me want to get him behind bars before lunch and cancel his order for knives from Amazon.

15.04.2026 – Pass the parcel

All graves are covered by grass in the end,
all wounds are healed by time, which is a comfort,…

Über alle Gräber wächst zuletzt das Gras,
Alle Wunden heilt die Zeit, ein Trost ist das,…

Friedrich Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder und andere Texte des Jahres 1834, Bearbeitet von Hans Wollschläger und Rudolf Kreutner. ©Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2007. Poem 167, p. 198.

The fire in the bar 'Le Constellation' in the upmarket Swiss alpine resort of Crans Montana that broke out in the early hours of New Year's Day this year suffocated or burned to death 41 young people and left a further 115 injured, many hideously burned. At the time of writing, 38 victims are still being treated in hospital.

It appears that the grass is steadily growing over that terrible grave, certainly in terms of the attention span of the public and media.

For here we are now in mid-April and it all seems an age ago in our busy world. The flowers and the candles have all gone and the whole affair has been passed over to the legion of lawyers who earn their bread from such disasters. The search after guilt and responsibility is grinding on and nothing legally definitive is known.

Whatever finally emerges in the months and years of the investigation that are to come, Switzerland in general, specifically the Canton of Wallis/Vaud and the administration of Crans Montana, have suffered a tremendous reputational blow.

At the centre, of course, are the owners of the bar, the somewhat mysterious Morettis, who carried out the renovation work that turned the cellar into a fire disaster waiting to happen, who reduced or locked off the escape routes, who allowed far too many customers into the bar and who allowed or perhaps even ordered the use of fireworks in the bar that was the immediate cause of the fire. Their defence lawyers will certainly have their work cut out. On the bright side for them, a French court has just ruled that their assets in France cannot be seized.

But the administration of Crans Montana was responsible for inspecting public businesses such as 'Le Constellation'. It is legally required to carry out inspections every year. The last inspection of the Morrettis' bar took place in 2019, six years ago. Worse still, the Morretis were sufficiently Swiss to submit planning applications for their remodelling, yet no one in authority showed any curiosity about the ramifications of these changes to the fire security of the building.

The President (Mayor) of Crans Montana, Nicolas Féraud, stated that no one told him the inspection(s) had not been carried out. Since it is ultimately his responsibility to ensure that the inspections are carried out in accordance with the legal requirements, we can say now that that excuse will probably not fly very far. The underlings who were directly responsible for carrying out the inspections are also marshalling their excuses: no one knew anything about anything, they were on holiday, the software didn't work properly, the computer was bust, staff shortages etc. There may be the odd Gallic shrug in there as well.

Even the insurance company which issues the liability insurance for 'Le Constellation' asserts that up to a 'normal' liability of between 5 and 20 million Swiss Francs there is no need to inspect what they are insuring. The liability arising from someone getting a champagne cork in the eye, for example, was priced in; the liability for the whole place burning down, killing 41 people and horribly injuring 115, was seemingly not worth checking up on and somehow now only covered for the maximum insured by the policy.

The Canton itself is not in the clear: on the contrary, it is stuck fast in the middle of the administrative and legal swamp. The Italian lawyers representing many of the victims are watching the investigation very closely and critically, particularly in the initial, shockingly leisurely approach to securing documentary evidence before it disappeared.

When the sloppiness of an investigation shocks even Italian lawyers, you know that there is definitely something going on. Within the administration of the Canton many serious and mysterious failures have been found – no surprise to many Swiss, who consider Canton Wallis/Vaud to be the 'place where the wild things are'(©Maurice Sendak), to put it kindly.

In a small Canton such as Wallis/Vaud, the lawyers are best mates or relatives of the politicians, the administrators and the business owners. It is just very difficult to find someone who is not tangled up in such associations. And of course, the noble Crans Montana is awash with money, the root of all evil. Only the very well-heeled can afford to vacation or rent or buy property there.

I suspect there is a bit of this in most Swiss cantons. I have first hand as well as anecdotal evidence from several cantons of how these things work, but they are generally harmless and fall into the category of 'oiling the wheels' rather than corruption. It seems Wallis/Vaud has taken not only its language but its corruption model in such matters from the French, a model which I have also encountered directly and never, ever, wish to encounter again.

Every bit of information that emerges from this enquiry extends the reputational damage to a supposedly clean and orderly Switzerland, a country very proud of its 'Swissness', which even has a legally enshrined marketing strategy to protect its image. As each of these stones gets turned over, daylight will fall on the unpleasant things lurking under it. But Switzerland is a confederation of the cantons: the Federal Government cannot simply boss Canton Wallis around, so it is going to have to grit its teeth and hope the grass grows over these graves as quickly as possible before the carefully curated clean image of Switzerland goes up in smoke.

14.04.2026 – Revolting

Harry and Meghan you-know-who exploiting very sick children at the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne for a photoshoot to their greater glory. Fire up the tumbrils!

05.04.2026 – Website changes

Twenty articles on this website are introductions to a collection of subpages. The navigation within these collections has been improved a little. For an example see 'The antennae of the race'.

In the year-menus the entries for these twenty articles are marked with a light-grey background colour. The word-count and reading-time figures refer only to that article and do not include the figures for the subpages. This is clearly an imperfection, but I shall try not to let that blemish rob me of my sleep. One day it will be fixed. [Update: 'tis done.]

01.04.2026 – Trump's erection by the sea

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

01.04.2026 – USA v. Iran in 42 seconds

X/Twitter, Fox News, 29.03.2026.

01.04.2026 – Why I could never be a police call handler

An Irish person by the name of Morgan McSweeney is said to be the right-hand man and all-purpose fixer for the British Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer. Not only is he Irish, he lives somewhere in the Highlands of Scotland.

He claimed that his official government phone was stolen on 20 October 2025 – nearly six months ago. It is assumed that this phone is replete with interesting exchanges with the long disgraced Peter Mandelson, making the theft of the phone extremely convenient for McSweeney, who is under pressure to reveal his dealings with said Mandelson. No backup exists either, apparently, which strikes one as odd for an official device… just even more suspension of disbelief for this tale.

McSweeney called the theft into the cops:

— Call handler: Police, what's your emergency?
— Caller: Oh, hello, someone just robbed my phone.
— Call handler: Did they actually take it from you just now?

English as she is spoke. Leaving 'did they actually take it from you just now' (translation: 'when did this happen?') to one side, there is a good reason that I could never get a job as a call handler. The conversation would have gone very differently:

— Call handler: Police, what's your emergency?
— Caller: Oh, hello, someone just robbed my phone.
— Could you put your phone on the line so that I can get some information directly from the victim?
— Er… No, someone just robbed my phone.
— Exactly. I need to speak to the victim.
— I'm the victim; my phone was robbed.
— Ah, I see. Do you mean to say that you have been robbed of your phone? That is, your phone has been stolen?
— Yes, that's right.
— Well, why didn't you say that in the first place?

Pedant's note

Seek and ye shall find. There are enough writers of defective English in the world to ensure that a search will find other instances of 'rob' being used where 'steal' is meant.

That does not legitimise its use, though. Using 'rob' in this way should be condemned, since 'steal' is perfectly clear in all situations and 'rob' is perfectly clear in its root meaning of 'depriving someone/something of something'.

The object of the transitive verb 'steal' is the thing stolen; the object of the transitive verb 'rob' is the person or thing deprived by the theft. The robber robs the person of the object, the thief steals the object from the person.

Using 'rob' for 'steal' is unnecessary and just muddies the clear meaning of the two verbs. 'We all know what he means' is no defence. If McSweeney wants to add a frisson of violence to the act, he could always use 'snatch', for example, but 'I have just been robbed of my phone' would be acceptable.

Pedantry it may be, but we serfs should not miss any opportunity, no matter how trivial, to give the arrogant, illiterate incompetents who have their boots on our necks a bit of a kicking.