A small series:
1. I was annoyed but not surprised when Barack Obama referred to Westminster as “The Mother of Parliaments” on Wednesday. This was not a surprising error for a foreigner even if his speechwriter should have been expected to know and do better. It is England that is the Mother of Parliaments, not Westminster. (Though the Icelanders have a legitimate grievance about this.) If Obama, being a poor foreigner, can be forgiven this what is Amanda Foreman’s excuse? I’d have thought an “historian” would know better but there she was on the BBC’s This Week making the same ignorant blunder. Not good enough.
2. Canute. A long-standing peeve. Canute did not think he could order the tide to recede; he ordered it to recede to show his courtiers that he could not command the ocean. It was a demonstration of modesty, not presumptious arrogance. One day or in a better world Canute will be rescued and given the Coolidgesque approval he deserves. That, for the avoidance of doubt, is heaps of credit.
3. James Fallows has laboured in these fields for years but he is right to make a point of observing that the “Boiled Frog” thing is a nonsense. If you attempt to cook a frog slowly it will still try and escape the pan as soon as the water becomes uncomfortably warm.
Readers are invited to keep me abreast of further breaches of these easily understood rules and, for that matter, asked to supply additional examples of comparable annoyingly persistent and ignorant misrepresentations of what is actually sodding so.
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