From Zoe Williams on Saturday, talking about people recalling their glorious days at Oxbridge:
It’s really unseemly — if they honestly feel themselves so privileged, connected and close to the epicentre of everything, is it necessary to ram it down everyone’s throats thus?
Three things:

Epicentre is not just a fancy word for centre. Epicentre relates to earthquakes. [...]

I’m unduly fascinated with venue. Yesterday a friend said she was going to “look at some venues” for an event she was planning. But actually a place is only a venue when you know the event is being held there — she hadn’t chosen her venue yet from the places she was visiting.
Princeton Wordnet says [...]

We referred to “Reg Vardy’s creationist academies” when we meant Sir Peter Vardy’s colleges run by his Emmanuel Schools Foundation (Of course women have a right to choose, etc, page 7, G2, September 15). Reg Vardy is a car dealership. [ref]
Tags: corrections, clarifications

Though I’d like to say I support Liberty and their work towards maintaining civil liberties, I find it incredibly hard in practice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an objective argument about anything from them — and specifically from their director, Shami Chakrabarti. This was demonstrated to me once again this weekend with Shami Chakrabarti’s [...]

So I was going to rant — as before — about the careless use of statistics in the coverage of newspaper circulation figures. But actually it looks like the goalposts have shifted slightly.
Press Gazette reports on November 2005 figures thus:
Circulation growth of The Guardian appears to have flattened out following its 12 September £80 million [...]

The Guardian, among others, reports
Seven judges in Britain’s highest court ruled yesterday that intelligence extracted by torture is not admissible in any British court. [...] The senior law lord, Lord Bingham, said: “The issue is one of constitutional principle, whether evidence obtained by torturing another human being may lawfully be admitted against a party to [...]

Bill Walsh catches the end of a debate about whether it’s acceptable for a waiter to say “no problem”. The final word, apparently, is that it’s unacceptable because it doesn’t make much sense. You’d think Bill, who’s a copy editor (subeditor to us Brits), would be a stickler for correct usage and would support this. [...]

On the front of today’s Guardian there are promos for Simon Jenkins saying David Cameron is “The Tories’ best bet since Thatcher” and Jonathan Freedland saying “Don’t be fooled, he’s as bad as Bush”. The paper has made a deliberate effort to open the debate up to more political view, hence these two [...]

More proof today of me being so utterly out of step with the modern world it’s a wonder I don’t die of consumption right now.
Neil reports that Ricky Gervais’s podcast at Guardian Unlimited has hit the top of the charts already. Fantastic news, indeed. A snapshot of the chart illustrates the story. And then someone [...]

When I was little I loved Richard Scarry’s picture books. They’re still being published, of course, but it seems they’ve been, er, updated a little to chime better with our more culturally sensitive times. Over at Flickr, kokogiak shows some differences between the 1963 and 1991 versions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever: American [...]