Alex Steer

750 words | ~4 min

Since before social media was a term anyone knew, we've been used to the idea that 'content is king' on the web. Any blog post (and now any Twitter post that stands a chance of being re-tweeted) should contain some new information, analysis or synthesis to avoid being lost in all the noise. This was true back when many individuals and organisations thought it was fine to build flashy websites with nothing useful on, and it's still true now that the web is littered with dead blogs with nothing to say.

When it comes to the post-election demonstrations in Iran, though, it seems there's almost nothing new to say. Hours of footage have made their way onto YouTube; it's being covered from all angles by blogs and mainstream news services (who haven't been as ineffective as was originally claimed); Twitter have rescheduled site maintenance to avoid downtime during the demonstrations; and its #iranelection hashtag is being added to more quickly than it can be read.

In this situation, 'content is king' needs rethinking. Yes, some sites, like the Huffington Post, are consistently ahead of the pack for quality of insight, but not everyone who is blogging or tweeting on Iran is trying to do what those sites are doing. Looking at #iranelection, it's clear that many just want to have a say, to show support, and just as importantly to keep the noise and the media chatter around this issue going. If one of the criticisms of mainstream media is that it too quickly loses interest in a story, this is a determination to prevent that from happening. Here it is not just that the stories are standing out from the noise. The noise is part of the story.

This can be beneficial or dangerous. The risk is that Iran's demonstrations will become no more than a social media cause celebre, interesting in itself for a while, then not. What really matters is the aftermath, and whatever government emerges in Iran as a result of this election period. The noise generated by the whole world has to be transformed into a mandate by Iranians, and then into a political programme which places less emphasis on the will and power of conservative clergy and more on secular governance, civil liberties and meaningful democratic accountability. That will be a difficult, dangerous job, and while it is perhaps made easier by the ability of social media to shine a light on political activity and to aggregate small expressions of political will, calling this a 'Twitter revolution' is naive at best. Twitter may represent voices from (not 'the voice of') civil society, but civil society is about action as well.

The effect on social media, especially Twitter, has been interesting. The concentration on #iranelection has shown the power and versatility of the hashtag to create temporary aggregations of people and ideas. The site itself, its parameters rather than its content, is beginning to be used as a political tool. At the time of writing there is a big push encouraging users to set their time and location zones to Tehran to generate extra noise in that zone which will stop security services identifying Iranian tweeters; and a smaller push to anonymise re-tweets, removing usernames which might give away the identity of Iranians involved in the protests. Whether these are legitimate and useful tactics it's hard to be sure, but they are at least a show of solidarity.

They are also an early signal of a growing belief in what I'll call 'civil social media' - social media considered as a tool for direct civil action. This belief holds that social media use is not just speech but action. We have yet to see how successful it will be, and whether content really can bring down kings.

135 words | ~1 min

My post on avocados, ethics and supermarket histories appears on the Futures Company blog today.

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) may expect that I'd have something to say on the highly-publicised claim by Global Language Monitor that there are now a million words in the English language. I do - their claim is meaningless - but clearly lexicographers think in packs, because two former colleagues of mine from the OED have already said it perfectly, so I'll defer to them.

1145 words | ~6 min

I've just read the excellent The Back of the Napkin, by the visualization consultant Dan Roam. Now, say the words 'visualization consultant' to people and they are likely to recoil slightly, imagining some person or organization churning out fantastically complicated systems diagrams in dense Powerpoint decks. But Dan's book is about representing information simply, and he demonstrates pretty persuasively that most strategic problems can be drawn up pretty simply. (There's a line of thought among strategic analysts that says that the ones that can't arise from faulty strategies.) His cartooning style also makes the book a delight to thumb through.

One of the endorsements on the back of the book troubled me a bit, though. It's from the designer Roger Black, and it says:

Visual information is much more interesting than verbal information. So if you want to make a point, do it with images, pictures, or graphics.

As a linguist you might not expect me to agree. And I don't, but not for purely territorial reasons. You see, while The Back of the Napkin demonstrates that simple visualisation is an effective way of showing the whats, whos, wheres and how-manys of situations and problems, I'm not convinced that it's the best way of addressing the whens and whys. I'm about to undermine my own point by using a bit of visualisation by means of bold text, but syntax - the structural features of language that most of us call 'grammar' - is an extremely good way of encoding processes and argument.

Sometimes, graphics are great. I could read you off a list of the amount of money spent by every UK government department in the 2007-8 financial year, and by the end you'd be mad and you'd only be able to remember a fraction of it. If I gave it to you written down, it would be a long list, and it would take you time to compare spending between the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority and the Rural Payments Agency. That's because writing is not a helpful or intuitive way of representing quantities. So instead I would just show you the Public Spending Atlas drawn up by the Guardian and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, and all would become clear.

Visualisation has its limits, though. A good diagram can tell you how a system is or how it should be, but will struggle to tell you why it isn't how it should be. Suppose you run a widget-making business with a faulty supply chain. I can show you a diagram of that chain and a diagram of a new improved chain, and both diagrams could be fairly simple and use no words other than labels for parts of the system. But how do I explain why your existing supply chain is wrong? What I could do is elaborate on the original diagram, adding boxes for the users of your widgets, fat and thin arrows for supply and demand levels, dotted lines to represent delivery time, etc., and hope that the diagram is complete enough that you can work out the problem and recognize that the new system is better. But I wouldn't. I'd use a single sentence to connect the old diagram to the new: 'Your supply chain is faulty because it doesn't get widgets to widget-users quickly enough.'

Within the syntax of that easy sentence are the basics of what the problem is, and why - in other words, what you need to know. I can then elaborate on that. 'This is because you send everything from your warehouse by second-class post. Send it first-class and the time lag will disappear. You can fund the extra postage costs by making your executives fly economy class to meetings instead of business class.' No diagrams required, and if you want you can rearrange the syntax to make the process sound linear rather than relational: 'Make your executives fly economy class; save money; spend money posting everything first class; then your customers will get their widgets quicker. Then they'll recommend you to their friends; then their friends will buy widgets from you; then you'll be rich and beloved of widget-users.' One of the beauties of syntax is that you can reconfigure it fast.

The insistence on diagramming everything seems to be one of the major bugbears people have with strategy consultants. The flow chart is the stock joke of consultant-haters because it seems to be an uneasy attempt to turn grammar into graphics. Powerpoint's ubiquitous process flow arrows come in for even more ridicule, because they describe linear processes with no decision points. They are, in other words, just sentences with arrows around them.

Consultant-haters also loathe the proliferation of bullet points, and not without reason. Just as flow charts try to make graphics do the work of grammar, bullet points do the opposite. Bullet points are fairly useful for simple lists of items, but in that case you might as well use a graphic as it will be easier on the eye. For any kind of argument, they impose an artificial syntax which makes everything look like a linear process. This can wreak havoc with systems, as Edward Tufte shows in his book The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint, as it can lead us to assume that the relationship between concepts is paratactic, when often it isn't.

So I disagree that graphics are always best. Continuous prose, despite its fall from fashion in the world of business, remains an elegant and powerful way to argue persuasively. Whereas graphics allow us to see whole systems at a glance, syntax is a much better way of reasoning about change and its consequences, and therefore of explaining the need for new and better systems. Michael Halliday's systemic functional grammar model argues that every sentence tells a story about the relationships between things, people or concepts in the world. It would be a shame if systems thinkers were to forget that systems are dynamic, or to abandon their best means of telling a good story.

508 words | ~3 min

Natural disasters are among the most unpredictable drivers of the future. If you're Arnold Schwarzenegger (you never know), governing a state whose economic powerhouses sit along and around the San Andreas fault, you can make as much economic policy as you want, and it won't matter much if an earthquake or an eruption knocks San Francisco off the map and Los Angeles into the sea. There is a science to measuring and predicting this sort of thing, but it's not good enough yet to provide reliable early warnings. For now, natural disasters can still take us by surprise.

The reason we try to predict natural disasters is because the future we're interested in is the human one, not the geological one. While oceanographers and vulcanologists were fascinated by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, most of us cared about it because of the destruction and the loss of human life it wrought. We still call these phenomena acts of God, because that's how they feel: immense, violent, utterly unpredictable.

But that's fundamentally not true, and we're being dishonest as a global society if we claim radical unpredictability. While it's true that we don't know when or (to some extent) where natural disasters will occur, we know what happens when they do, and we know why.

The United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction has just published its first Global Assessment Report, Risk and poverty in an international climate. The contents are neatly and powerfully summarised by Tim Radford in the Guardian. The message, based on 32 years' worth of disaster statistics, tells a simple, compelling story about disasters past and present.

The story is that poverty and corruption kill people in natural disaster scenarios. Poor housing, poor infrastructure, poor healthcare, poor governance, poor resourcing, poor urban planning: these are the determiners of life or death for many who are caught in the middle when the earth starts shaking or the water starts pouring in.

These things are not unpredictable, and they are not unpreventable. Those in power cannot know if, when or where a natural disaster will strike, but they can know what impact it will have if it does. A government that does not try to protect against the excess harms caused by poverty and corruption is a government that has given over its people as hostages to the future. It is a bad government.

Whether we're talking about earthquakes, crime rates, epidemics or MPs' expenses (just to be topical), civil society's job is to make sure that the spectre of the unpredictable is never used as an excuse.

1288 words | ~6 min

Two-sentence version: Fakecharities.org thinks government funding makes charities mouthpieces of the state. It is wrong.

Long version...

Bad Science author Ben Goldacre brought the website fakecharities.org to the attention of a fairly wide readership the other day when he wrote this Twitter post:

FakeCharities.org: fun idea, nicely run site http://rly.cc/8qVXn

The link is to a blog post on the website of the free-market think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, who describe fakecharities.org as 'excellent'.

Without disrespect to Ben, the purpose of this post is to argue that fakecharities.org is not a fun idea, or a good one. Instead it demonstrates a serious misunderstanding of the charitable sector and (I think) a wilful attempt to change public perceptions of what charities are.

A bit of information first. Fakecharities.org says it is edited by The Devil's Kitchen, a libertarian-leaning UK political blog. The fakecharities.org domain is registered to Chris Mounsey, a freelance graphic designer who is also head of communications for the recently reformed UK Libertarian Party.

There site is very open about its intentions. It describes itself as:

A directory of those so-called charities that receive substantial funding from either the UK or EU governments. These charities are usually brought to our attention through interviews in the mainstream media (MSM) in which they support the position of the government that funds them. Further, there is nothing charitable about tax being taken, by force, from you and me: charity is about voluntary giving. These organisations thrive on theft. At fakecharities.org, we believe that these effective QUANGOs and state-lobbying agencies are not only undemocratic but, being funded through taxes rather than donations, are effectively stealing donations from real charities—those that do valuable community work.

Let's break down some of the assumptions that the site makes about charities.

1. There are 'fake charities' and 'real charities'.
2. 'Fake charities' are those who operate mostly on statutory income (money from public sources).
3. 'Real charities' are those who operate mostly on non-statutory income.
4. Charities who operate mostly on statutory income are government mouthpieces principally engaged in lobbying to make government policy look legitimate.
5. Charities who fall outside this group do 'valuable community work'.
6. By extension, these 'fake charities' do not do 'valuable community work'.

Here's why it's wrong.

Government is not throwing money at charities. Fakecharities.org drastically underestimates the extent and complexity of statutory funding. Income from government bodies does not come in the form of massive bungs to charities' central funds. One of the biggest problems charities face is that government money always comes with strings attached, and not in the way fakecharities.org thinks. More often than not it is 'restricted' income - money that can only be used for certain a very defined purpose.

Charities have a role in public services. Most of the time, this purpose is the delivery of public services. It is seldom, if ever, lobbying and campaigning. Historically, this money has tended to come in the form of grants. It is increasingly coming in the form of service-delivery contracts, which place even stronger conditions on how it can be used. Charities have to bid for contracts, often against private companies as well as other charities. This system (known as 'commissioning') is complex, expensive for charities and usually operated at the local authority level rather than by central government. The rather glamorous idea of a QUANGOesque demi-monde in which charities exist to talk up government policy is fantastical. More often than not, charities spend their time fighting for contracts from local councils.

Yes, there is a lot of money in this. We shouldn't underestimate the scale of this: according to the Charity Commission, 60% of medium-sized and large charities deliver public services, and so receive some sort of statutory income. One third of these, it's true, receive 80% or more of their income for service-delivery work.

But no, it doesn't come easy. However, this does not mean that all those charities are in some sort of financial wonderland. Charities that are heavily reliant on government money, far from being shills for government policy, are hugely vulnerable to it. If policy changes, their money goes. Over two-thirds of public-service contracts are for a single year or less, which makes financial planning a nightmare. Only 12% of charities manage to cover the full cost of their service-delivery work from the government, because these grants often don't cover basics like heating, lighting and office admin.

Charities are feeling the pressure. Barely more than a quarter of charities who deliver public services feel that they are free from pressure to conform to their funders' wishes. Charities who operate largely on government money find it very difficult to develop new areas of work because they simply cannot afford it. They are caught in a vicious circle: since they often cannot afford sophisticated fundraising operations, they cannot get the unrestricted income they need to avoid this pressure. They have a tendency to chase government contracts, a process which is itself costly and time-consuming. This is not a world in which charity chief executives are throwing wads of cash in the air while singing the praises of government initiatives.

Most charities do not lobby. The lobbying role of charities is not larger than it should be: it is not large enough. Uncertainties about how campaigning fits with charitable status, together with prohibitive costs of entry, discourage many charities from trying to influence policy. Yes, there are plenty of high-profile examples, but many simply do not know where to begin. They are left mopping up the outcomes of social problems which they believe could be more effectively tackled by early intervention from government. (This is not a view I expect libertarians to share, though of course many libertarians believe very sensibly in a market-orientated approach to early intervention which may be even more efficient. It's just that, bluntly, that market does not yet exist and will take time to be created. At the moment, the best hopes for early intervention lie with the state.) For the full picture on charities' campaigning activities and their many limitations, see New Philanthropy Capital's excellent report Critical Masses, written by some of my former colleagues.

Fakecharities.org's view of the sector is inaccurate. It is also, I think, corrosive. Of course waste in public services is not good, but the website's bold but wrong assertions, and its series of institutional character assassinations (see the A to Z listing), do nothing to improve the quality of public-service delivery or the lot of charities, and provide a very distorted image of the work charities do, completely ignoring the difficulties they face, and inviting the kind of unthinking condemnation of them that makes it harder for them to build independent funding for that work.

I am a former non-profit analyst turned strategy consultant. I know a good deal about the charitable sector and how it works, especially financially, and I'd invite questions in the comments section of this post if anything is unclear.

554 words | ~3 min

Waltham Forest is one of the most deprived areas in London, and in the country. Of England and Wales's 376 local authorities, it's in the top 20 for overcrowded housing and single-parent households (a good indicator for poverty and poor outcomes for children), and in the top 30 for unemployment. It has among the highest levels of gang activity in the capital. To say it has a bit of a youth crime problem would be a generous understatement.

The council has introduced mandatory electronic weapons screening in 15 of the borough's 19 secondary schools. (The Times headline is wrong to call the checks 'random' - they are to be routine. It also repeats the rather uninformed story about stab vests.) So far no knives have been found, but the council has denied that it is being alarmist.

In one sense, it's easy to sympathise, since clearly there are knives (and worse) in circulation around Waltham Forest to some degree, and the evidence from policing suggests that those knives are overwhelmingly being circulated among young people. If the council want to start finding those knives, then schools don't seem a bad place to start. Setting up screening panels in libraries, fish shops and old people's homes would be alarmist.

The problem is, the screening is not a symptom of alarmism, though it is what you might call an unhelpfully broad application of a search methodology. Imagine going to Google wanting to find the engine spec on a new Porsche, and trying to find it by typing 'cars'. By searching every child, every day for knives, Waltham Forest are making sure they are kept busy forever sifting through incredible amounts of noisy and useless results. (Judge for yourselves whether 'noisy and useless' is a term fairly applied to teenagers.)

Normally, when you Google 'cars' instead of 'new Porsche engine spec', it's just your own time you're wasting. Your irrelevant search results won't think badly of you. And this is where the analogy breaks down. Screening every child, every day just sends the message that the council barely knows where to begin to find knives, and therefore that the individual kids and the gangs are smarter and better organised. (If ever organisations understood targeted marketing, gangs do.)

There are even more corrosive symptoms of this approach. It may not be alarmist, but it will cause alarmism. It will erode, probably quite quickly, the idea that schools are safe places, or that they represent something different from, even better than, whatever ideas or ideals drive behaviour in the communities surrounding them. No school in Waltham Forest can ever claim to be a beacon or a city on a hill now. And while it may be true that its schools are not perfectly safe places, there is little to be gained from such a stark demonstration that the council believes this, especially when combined with a search strategy that makes the powers that should protect look disorganised and confused. The sense of isolation and the fear that this will generate may drive more children into the care of gangs which, above all, offer protection and the illusion of control.

332 words | ~2 min

Over at Mission Measurement there's a good little post cautioning against an overly narrow conception of what philanthropic foundations are for. As Kim Silver (the MM author) says, the US National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy's recommendation that a good funder should give 'at least 50 percent of its grant dollars to benefit lower-income communities, communities of color, and other marginalized groups' excludes foundations with entirely different objectives (such as environmental foundations), and makes some unnecessary assumptions about what they should fund.

The independence of funders is an important and a worthwhile thing because it provides pools of capital that can be put to use beyond the kind of specific policy objectives that direct where government charitable funding goes. Just as importantly, though, funders are not simply piggy-banks with human faces. They can, at their most useful, be productive sources of ideas for social change. Foundations often possess the qualities looked for in the best think tanks: intelligent and passionate people, a wealth of knowledge and experience of the areas within which they work, and the resources to invest in (and sometimes even help develop) effective solutions.

At present, only a handful of foundations are taking full advantage of their knowledge base to act as effective advocates, movers and shakers: Joseph Rowntree is a fine example. The growing profile of venture philanthropy is positive in this regard, though their expertise is necessarily often lent to individual charities as part of an investment, rather than to advocacy and reactive work to further their objectives. Just as charities are beginning to explore their freedom to act as campaigners and advocates, it would be positive to see more funders doing the same in order to use what they know, harness the passion of their staff, and supplement their financial giving.

39 words | ~0 min

My post on the social and economic drivers of pandemics (and our fear of them) appears on the Futures Company blog this morning.

973 words | ~5 min

On Wednesday, the wonderful elves at Qikipedia (the Twitter presence of QI) announced that:

The word 'twitter' was first used by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1374.

Now, this is obviously the sort of thing to make lexicographers (even washed-up former lexicographers) sit up and take notice. So let's get the big, obvious and pedantic problem out of the way first.

If you look at the OED's entry for twitter, v.1 (originally published in 1926; included in the 1989 Second Edition), the first quotation in the first sense ('intr. Of a bird: To utter a succession of light tremulous notes; to chirp continuously with a tremulous effect.') is:

1374 CHAUCER Boeth. III. met. ii. 54 (Camb. MS.) The Iangelynge bryd..enclosed in a streyht cage..twiterith desyrynge the wode with her swete voys.

There are no other quotations that seem to antedate 1374, so Chaucer appears to claim the prize for earliest use.

But that doesn't, of course, mean that he invented the word. Just that his translation of Boethius's Consolatio Philosophiae (normally known as Boece) is recorded in the OED as containing the earliest example of the word that had been found by 1926. This is one of those things that lexicographers will tell you until they die: earliest citation does not necessarily mean invention.

There's another problem, though. A lot of work has been done on medieval books and writing since 1926, and a lot more has been discovered. Language changes, but so does our knowledge of language in use. That's one of the reasons why the OED is being continuously updated, with new and revised entries now being published online every quarter. (See the website for information.) It's common, with the tools now at lexicographers' disposal, to find earlier examples (known as 'antedatings') for words.

In the case of twitter, no new example has been found. Instead, something more complicated has happened to knock Chaucer off his perch. Welcome to the surprising world of historical bibliography...

The second quotation given for the first sense of twitter is:

1387 TREVISA Higden (Rolls) I. 237 Þe nytyngale in his note Twytereþ wel fawnyng Wiþ full swete song.

For those not familiar with Middle English, the weird 'þ' character is called 'thorn', and pronounced 'th'. For those baffled by the OED's slightly cryptic citation, this is the translation by the fourteenth-century Cornish vicar John Trevisa of the Polychronicon, a history of the world by Ranulf Higden, a Benedictine monk from Chester. We know exactly when Trevisa finished his translation, because he noted it at the end:

God be {th}onked of al his nedes {th}is translacioun is I ended in a {th}orsday {th}e ey{gh}te{th}e day of Aueryl {th}e {y}ere of oure lord a {th}owsand {th}re hondred foure score and seuene {th}e ten{th}e {y}ere of kyng Richard.

This might seem irrelevant if the Chaucer quotation comes from 1374. The reason it matters is that we need to know not when we think Geoffrey Chaucer might have finished writing Boece or when John Trevisa might have finished writing Polychronicon, but when the earliest surviving manuscript containing the word twitter dates from.

You see, books and manuscripts were copied and recopied - it was a huge industry in fourteenth and fifteenth-century England, before the invention of print (and after, for some time) - and the copyists would introduce changes. Sometimes this would be to replace words from one local dialect to make the work comprehensible to readers elsewhere in the country; sometimes it just seems to have been personal preference or error. It's quite rare to have an author's original copy of a work in his or her own hand. (These are known as holographs, which sounds quite exciting but isn't. There's a possible holograph of Chaucer's Equatorie of the Planets in the manuscript collection of Peterhouse, Cambridge.) All of this means that you can't guarantee that a word in a manuscript was put there by the author. (You can get more and more sure by comparing different manuscripts, but that's about all.)

Here comes the science. The manuscript of Chaucer's Boece in which the word twitter appears is called Cambridge, University Library MS Ii.1.38, and has been dated to the first quarter of the 15th century, somewhere around 1425. (There are lots of ways of dating manuscripts, which thankfully I'm not going into here.) The manuscript of Trevisa's Polychronicon is Cambridge, St John's College, MS H.1, and dates to the late 14th century, somewhere between 1387 and 1400. It is the earliest manuscript copy of the Polychronicon that survives.

That means that our earliest example of twitter appears in the Polychronicon, not in Boece. Until someone finds an earlier one, anyway.

So next time you use Twitter, spare a thought for John Trevisa. He may or may not have invented the word, but he was one of English's great organisers and sharers of content. Not content with a massive chronicle, he also translated the Middle Ages' most popular encyclopedia (Bartholomeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum, 'On the Properties of Things'), and may also have been involved in the effort by John Wycliffe's friends and followers to translate the Bible into English.

Though not, admittedly, in 140 characters or fewer.

930 words | ~5 min

Update: 16 March 2009 - Rob Wilson's blog no longer seems to be available.

Jim Knight, the Schools Minister, has spelling mistakes on his blog. Predictably, everybody is having a field day with this, dutifully listing some of the more egregious errors. Rob Wilson, the Conservative education spokesman, managed this rather neat jibe about his opponent:

He will be disappointed with his efforts in class but I'm sure he'll make every effort to improve now teacher has noticed he's falling behind.

The papers are loving it too. The Telegraph, always a stickler for standards, has wheeled its grammarians out of whichever corners grammarians inhabit, to remind us that:

Mr Knight, who is responsible for raising education standards, also clearly has problems with the "i before e, except after c" spelling rule taught to primary school pupils.

Two things are clear. The first is that we love a good laugh at someone's expense. There is perhaps no neater world-gone-mad story than one about a schools minister who's not very good at spelling. It gives expression to our dislike for authority figures, while at the same time letting us remind ourselves how much we love hard and fast rules when it comes to language - or, at least, how much we love letting other people know that we know those rules. There's room within the story for shock and disappointment (genuine or otherwise), and for a little bit of smugness to round it off. He may be the schools minister, but we can spell 'recess'.

The second thing that's clear is that none of Jim Knight's fastidious nemeses has heard of Muphry's Law. This is the jokey adage, common among proofreaders, editors, lexicographers and the like, that any written criticism of editing or proofreading will itself contain an editing or proofreading error.

In this case, Muphry's Law has chosen the Telegraph as its victim. Here's the first full paragraph of its piece:

The mispellings of Mr Knight, who was educated at Cambridge University, include "maintainence", "convicned", "curently", "similiar", "foce", "pernsioners", "reccess" and "archeaological".

Yes, that's mispellings.*

But the Law has another, perhaps more perfect victim this week. It's Rob Wilson, the abovementioned Conservative education spokesman. Mr Wilson also has a blog. Both Jim Knight and Rob Wilson have published posts of roughly equivalent length in the last week. (Jim Knight's is 337 words; Rob Wilson's is 465.)

I could be unreasonably cruel to them both and go through their posts as an editor, looking for the whole range of improvements that need making to grammar, style, punctuation, etc. But since this fight is about spelling, let's stick to words that are spelled incorrectly.

In Jim Knight's post:

In their plans schools could set up where ever, with no local co-ordination.

This should read 'wherever'. I count this as a spelling error, because 'wherever' is, in this context, probably best read as locative adverb (elliptically for 'wherever they like' or similar, in which 'wherever' is a subordinating conjunction), for which you can't really substitute the conjunction + adverb combination 'where ever' (even though this is the root of the subordinating conjunctive use of 'wherever' - stop me if this is getting too exciting). It's therefore not a valid option for spelling the word Jim Knight wanted to use.

In Rob Wilson's post:

I also know that the procedures of Parliament get things right many more times then they get them wrong

Then should be than.

and

I am a lover of Parliamentary democracy and the traditions developed here over hundred's of year.

Hundred's should be hundreds.

So, Rob Wilson's most recent post contains twice as many errors as Jim Knight's. Clearly the Schools Minister has been learning his lesson and checking his work.

But does it matter, even slightly? A sociolinguist will tell you that people apply different standards of orthography according to the media in which they're writing. That's why, despite a million scare stories, kids don't tend to write their homework in text-speak, and why your respectable auntie will send you texts without any vowels in. Anyone, sociolinguist or otherwise, will tell you that sometimes mistakes creep in because of errors in what you do, not what you know. If you type quickly and don't check your spelling, you might end up with 'recieve' instead of 'receive'. It doesn't make you an idiot, just a bit careless. And you might have good reason not to care. Blogs, even MPs' blogs, still have a reputation as being informal means of communication. That's part of their charm. That means they don't go through rigorous proofing and correction (apart from this one, obviously). That's probably especially true when their authors have other things to do, like, say, being responsible for the performance of every school in the country.

You'd think, given the widespread impression that all political communications are now ruthlessly controlled, we might be reassured by a few typos.**

* By the way, Googling 'mispelling' is a hilarious experience. You get a lot of pages of people using the word to complain about other people's misspellings.

** Yes, maybe that's the point. Conspiracy theories to the usual address.