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It’s weird how when people go to work – whether it’s happens when they get dressed in the morning or walk through the doors of their office building – they start to get a bit oldy-worldy with their word choices. It’s as if this weekend you might visit the Ideal Home Exhibition, purchase chattels and fine adornments to place upon the mantel within your abode, and then go to work on Monday and start talking normally – only it’s the other way round.

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It has been a strenuous week. After writing about Frank Luntz I began to feel paranoid about distorted messages and not being able to understand the words anymore. And now I suspect my colleagues are trying to catch me out. Why else would they ask if I’ve “been sighted of a document”? › Continue reading

Following some very frightening revelations from the world’s leading climate scientists this week, George Monbiot has used his Guardian blog to suggest the term ‘climate change’ needs updating.

The expression ‘climate change’ was first advanced in a memo from the Republican political strategist Frank Luntz, who found that those attending his focus groups thought it sounded less scary than ‘global warming’.

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How long do you think the recession will last? Six more months? Fifteen years? Only ten? Or is it impossible to tell because we’ve “never seen anything like it before”? Who knows, but one thing I’m sure of is that there won’t be any work for editorial staff by the end of it. Everyone will be a Globish-speaking publisher or journalist by then.

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