The Turnip Prize

If you’ve ever been baffled by the Turner Prize, you’re likely to find the annual Turnip Prize, keenly competed for by amateur artists in the Somerset village of Wedmore, much more accessible and entertaining.

Recent years have seen entries such as Tea P (Used tea bags in the shape of a P), Flyin saucer (dead fly in a saucer) and Bunch of Marigolds (a posy of yellow rubber gloves).

Putting in 'too much effort' or framing a work of art are grounds for disqualification.

For more information, see HERE and HERE for a selection of past exhibits.

What’s the difference between a flu 'pandemic' and a flu 'epidemic'?

I got a pretty good grade in English ‘A’ level, have spent half my life studying how language actually works and have even managed to publish five books on the subject.

So it’s quite un-nerving to realise that I’m not at all sure what a ‘pandemic’ is, even though it was the only word used in the reports of ‘swine’ (why not ‘pig’) flu in last night’s BBC television news (and every other news report I've heard or read in the last few days).

In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m the only person in the country who doesn’t know what it means, because journalists and broadcasters have taken to using the word ‘pandemic’ as if it’s perfectly obvious to everyone what a 'pandemic' is.

I definitely do know what an ‘epidemic’ is, because I had the misfortune to suffer from Asian flu during the Christmas holidays in 1957-8 – which I then had to pay for in hard labour, as one of the few ‘fags’ of my year fit enough to serve as a slave for the few prefects who were still well enough to need their shoes cleaning.

But I never heard anyone in the media or anywhere else use the word ‘pandemic’ at the time, and had never heard of it until a few years ago.

This has made me wonder if it’s yet another case of one word being replaced by another for no apparent reason – in the same way as journalists now insist on telling us that something is happening ‘ahead of’ rather than ‘before’ something else.

Dictionaries I’ve consulted haven’t been a lot of help, and the best I’ve been able to come up with so far is that a ‘pandemic’ seems to be an epidemic that spreads across more than one country.

Does this mean that the Asian flu ‘epidemic’ in the Winter of 1957-8, which certainly wasn’t confined to the UK, was in fact a ‘pandemic’?

If so, why didn’t anyone say so in 1957-8?

More to the point, can anyone explain to me why today’s media prefer the word 'pandemic' to ‘epidemic.’?

Or is it just that ‘pandemic’ sounds much more serious than 'epidemic' and makes the story sound more sensational?

Oxford professor models jeans

Here’s a short clip from a TED lecture by Oxford mathematician Professor Peter Donnelly, who does important work in genetics.

Rhetorically speaking, it’s a nice example of how effective a simple sequence of PUZZLE-SOLUTION-PUZZLE-SOLUTION can be (on which, of course, you can learn more in my books).

A great source of videos for anyone interested in speaking and presentation

While preparing for a visit to the University of Michigan, I was directed by one of my hosts to a fantastic source of free videos of lectures by a range of distinguished experts who speak about quite complicated subjects, mostly in a very accessible way.

If you don’t know it already, I’d strongly recommend a visit to TED – where you might like to start by watching Professor Peter Donnelly, an Oxford mathematician, who makes probability theory sound far more fascinating than anyone who ever tried to teach me maths or statistics.

The website introduces TED as follows:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

A Tory leader's three evasive answers to the same question

Another gem from my video archive confirms that not answering an interviewer's questions isn't a monopoly of Labour leaders like Clement Attlee, as was vividly demonstrated 35 years ago, when a young David Frost asked the same question three times in an attempt to find out whether or not the then Tory leader, Edward Heath, liked the then Labour leader, Harold Wilson:

If you've arrived here belatedly (via Iain Dale's Daley Dozen on 5 Jan 2010), you might also be interested in my latest post on 'A Snakes & Ladders Theory of Political Communication' - which doesn't really go along with Iain's optimism about the effectiveness of interviews with politicians.