Orwell Blog Prize, 2011: a request for help from readers

I've had an email suggesting that I should nominate this blog for the 2011 Orwell Blog Prize, details of which can be found HERE.

The entry form asks for a list 10 posts between 1 January and 31 December 2010 on which the judges can deliberate - which is all very well except for two rather obvious problems:
  1. There are 196 to select from (so far).
  2. Authors are never the best judges of their own work.
HELP!
So I'd very much appreciate it if readers could let me know - either by email via 'complete profile' in the left-hand column or in the 'comments' section below - which post(s) you've liked the best, found most interesting, intriguing, instructive, amusing, etc.

If you've time to go back over the year, you can access a complete list of blog posts during 2010 via the link on the left.

Background from Owell Prize website
The Orwell Prize 2011 is now accepting entries, opening on Thursday 21st October 2010 and closing on Wednesday 19th January 2011. All work published for the first time between 1st January 2010 and 31st December 2010 is eligible. All entries must have a clear relationship with the UK or Ireland (which might include, but is not limited to, citizenship or residency of the author or the work being published first or only in the UK or Ireland) - (my emphases).

The Prize is self-nominating – somebody involved in the production of the work (author, journalist, blogger, publisher, agent or editor) must enter it. If you’ve come across some great political writing this year which you think should be considered, please contact the administrator or discuss on our blog.

Once the administrator has received your entry, you should receive a confirmation email. Please get in touch if you haven’t received one after a few days.

After the entry deadline has closed, a list of entries will be published on this website.
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Should prime ministers sing songs?

One of the videos currently available on the Sky News website is an extraordinary clip of prime minister Putin singing the Fats Domino hit I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill at a charity concert:



The sight of a prime minister singing took me back more than 30 years to the last time I remember seeing it happen - when James Callaghan kept the TUC guessing about whether he'd call an election in October 1978 (when he might well have won) or defer it to 1979 (which he did and lost to Margaret Thatcher) with his rendition of Marie Lloyd's Waiting at the Church.

On the basis of these two specimens, Putin comes across as the better singer of the two - and, unlike Callaghan, is unlikely to have done his future prospects any serious damage.

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Naughtie's gaffe: 'C', 'K' & 'U' sounds or 'Freudian slippage'?

I've been a bit late catching up on news of James Naughtie's 'slip of the tongue' on BBC Radio 4's Today programme last week because I was away on holiday when it happened.

But I did hear about it and started wondering, as I did on hearing of Gordon Brown's claim to have 'saved the world', whether it would turn out to be yet another case of an 'error' being triggered by sounds of nearby words.

Now I've been able to listen to it, I can report that this is exactly what appears to have happened. As you can see from the transcript and hear in the audio-clip below, the hard 'c' or 'k' sound came just before and twice in quick succession immediately after the dreaded 'slip' - and, when a speaker is reading, he can see sounds and rhymes coming up before he's actually read out some of the earlier words (including the 'u' sound that also comes both before and after the error):

"First up after the news we're going to be talking to Jeremy Kunt-Hunt the culture secretary about broadband.."



As such, it was a fairly ordinary example of what the late Gail Jefferson described as a 'sound-formed error' (as too was Gordon Brown's 'saving the world' gaffe).

But, as I noted of Sarah Palin's recent North Korean 'slip of the tongue' - an example of the related 'category-formed error' - 'The trouble is ... that media commentators (and other experts) love to find deeper meaning in such errors, regardless of how they were formed. As Jefferson pointed out in her original paper, many alleged 'Freudian slips' turn out to be 'sound-formed' or 'category-formed' errors.

And on Radio 4 last Monday, it hardly took an hour for just such an expert to pop up in the very next programme, Andrew Marr's Start the Week - where one of the guests, David Aaronovich of The Times, was there to plug a series of programmes he'd made on ... er.. Freudian Slippage:


'C' , 'K', 'U' - or 'Freudian slippage'?
Although I've always been mystified by the extraordinary intellectual influence of a theory as thin on empirical backing as Freud's (unless it really is just that id, ego and superego amount to a particularly impressive example of the persuasive power of three-part lists), there's one thing about all the reports I've read about Mr Naughtie's gaffe that makes me wonder whether there might be more to all that sexual gobbledygook than I'd thought.

After all, everything I've seen about the story in the media refers to the four-letter word in question as C*** and not, as I did in my transcript above, as Kunt.

Could this, I wonder, along with the coughing and sniggering to be heard in the two audio clips, be firmer evidence of 'Freudian slippage' than anything said by Mr Naughtie last Monday morning?

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