What a shame, then, to spoil it with a crashing cliché in the second paragraph, which described the school as being "a stone's throw from Coventry's bustling city centre". Who in real life measures distances in throws of stones? And does Coventry city centre bustle any more than any other shopping precinct?

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Controversial renown: Our report, also on Monday, of Angela Merkel's new government said that it included "a controversial and openly gay ( Read more... )
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A "vehicle" in the film sense is a production in which an established star is given the lead role with the likely guarantee that audiences will buy tickets almost irrespective of the film's overall merits. The star's presence is what counts.

When Hugh Grant appeared in Four Weddings, now all of 15 years ago, he was very far from an established star. He had a few films to his name but it was Four Weddings that transformed him from a relative unknown. So the film ( Read more... )
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What follows is neither an error nor an omission, merely an instance of a grammatical divergence between British and American English, and of how easily writers and speakers go native. On Monday Guy Adams, a true-born Englishman who has been our Los Angeles correspondent for some time, commented on the effect of recession on Las Vegas: "The city's unemployment rate just broke 13 per cent." In British English that should be "has just broken 13 per cent".

Where ( Read more... )
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The use of "emanate" as a synonym for "emit" is not absolutely unknown, but the Oxford English Dictionary classifies it as rare. Too rare to use, I would submit. The usual meaning of "emanate" is much closer to the word's Latin roots ? to flow out. The primal energy emanates from the actress; the actress does not emanate the energy.

Such mistakes about the proper application of the right verb to the right grammatical object are quite common. "That'll learn you," a ( Read more... )
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On that basis, you would have to cap up the T wherever "the" applies to any proper noun. Stand by for The First World War, and heaven knows what.

However, if Radiohead do produce their song, and if it is called "The Last Tommy", then, in the song title, the capital T would be right. By and large, the capital T is confined to the names of periodicals where "The" appears on the masthead, and the titles of literary and artistic works ? The Third Man, The Tempest, The ( Read more... )
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I was put in mind of the poem by our coverage on Tuesday of Elizabeth Wong, the Malaysian politician who found herself at the centre of a scandal over photographs taken of her while she was asleep.

Our story began: "Four months ago nude pictures forced Elizabeth Wong into hiding." That suggested to me that Ms Wong had posed for the pictures. But further into the paragraph we were told that her boyfriend "used his mobile phone to take pictures of her while she slept ( Read more... )
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Daniel Simmons writes in from Herne Bay in Kent to draw attention to a review that appeared on Monday. In its first sentence Grace Jones was described as an "Eighties style icon", while near the end came this: "Such is Jones's image now, as an iconoclast, clothes horse and cultural symbol, that her music seems to take a back seat."

It is worth recalling the origins of "icon". It is a Greek word meaning image. It signifies particularly the painted religious images ( Read more... )
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