Friday 6 August 2010

How stylish: All the Simon Heffer emails online


The Telegraph has put Simon Heffer's "style notes" to the paper's journalists online so we can all have a good laugh at the various mistakes they've made and the crimes committed against the English language.
Here's a sample from May this year: "We have made rather a rash of factual errors, some of them bordering on the obtuse. We made theological history by arguing that Christ fed the 5,000 with three loaves: in fact He took five (and two fishes: Mark, Chapter 6, verse 38). We attributed an action to Shakespeare in 1513 when he was not born until 1564. We said Bach was born in 1865; it was 1685. We described Istanbul as the capital of Turkey; it is Ankara. We had Benazir Bhutto ending her exile in 2008; she was assassinated in 2007. We talked of Queen Victoria’s trip to India, a place she never visited: she never went further abroad than the near continent. We cause grave offence to our Polish friends by referring to Auschwitz as “a Polish concentration camp”; it was a Nazi concentration camp established by the Germans on Polish soil. A head of state is not inevitably the same as a head of government. Her Majesty the Queen is our Head of State and David Cameron is her head of government; Presidents Sarkozy and Obama are both. Radiographer is not a term interchangeable with radiologist; the former is a technician and the latter a qualified doctor."

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