You don't need to swear to be funny or get your point across

Something everyone should learn is from an article that caught my eye on the BBC website this evening by Clive James, where he talk about... the removal of swearing?

Indeed, because we're all a bit partial to slipping a curse word in to emphasise our point, even from managers to kids with no manners to grandmothers swear (when they do I make the sign of the cross for the very sin of letting one slip), what if we just took them out.

Frank Skinner did so at one of his stand up gigs once. No one noticed. Maybe we should cut it out too, and not stain our childrens' souls with language that would turn the air blue.

Read what Clive James had to say here

"I could have 300 siblings" and new credit crunched cars

An emotional piece in the Guardian today about a woman speaking on siblings of donated sperm. While adoption is something people are more familiar with. I guess you never think about children of donated sperm because the biological father doesn't have to be on the birth certificate. It's interesting medium-length reading.

It turns out if you fancy bartering on a new car, dealers are willing to bend backwards to any offer you make according to this article in the Mail.

The origins of text speak (txt spk)

Ah to be going through stacked copies of newspaper supplements I never got round to reading.
As it so happens, txt spk has been around far longer than you may have thought. That's right. Even Dickens used it!

If you thought txt spk is "dsgstng" due to it's lack of vowels and punctuation, check out this article I found in the Guardian Review earlier:

2b or not 2b

It's an extract from the writer's book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. I'm sure he appreciates my plugging of his product :)