I’ve often told students that we do not use expletives in everyday English quite as often as some non-British people think. Reading Giles Coren’s letters, for instance to his subeditors at the Times (which I have inexplicably missed till now), you might believe different.

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed “a” so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Here’s the reply to that.

If you could only see the state of some of the raw copy we have to knock into shape. It’s badly structured, poorly spelt, appallingly punctuated, lazily researched. We’re not saying your writing falls into that category – on the contrary, your journalism is highly accomplished. Never having worked on your copy, we can only take your word for it that it is beyond improvement in its pre-published state. Strange as it may seem, many writers do not possess your grasp of language; indeed it is sometimes difficult to believe that English is their mother tongue, and they don’t give a damn about what they produce because they know that a good, often highly educated sub-editor will correct it, check it and turn it into readable prose.

I do understand the way he feels. If I had known the second meaning of nosh I would have understood it better. I don’t think I felt quite so bad when practically every sentence of my article for a well-known translators’ magazine in the USA was heavily revised, sometimes changing the meaning, but it was time-consuming dealing with it. I do remember writing a poem for the school magazine and my word ‘people’ being changed to ‘folk’, which in British English at the time was rather twee, and being very annoyed. But of course, that’s not the main point.

Is it Norma just cranking up for Thanksgiving? Actually, this doesn’t remind me very much of the sandwiches I ordered halves of in New York. And do they do Putenschinken (turkey ham)?

Discussing turducken, Maki recalls American sandwiches after living in England for five years:

I had a somewhat similar experience when my family moved from England (where we’d spent 5 years), to White Plains, a suburb of New York. At the time England was not nearly as Americanized as it is now. We were absolutely stunned by the abundance, and color, and noise, of this new country we found ourselves in. Millions of TV channels! The huge portions at the diner where our mother took us for lunch! The chef’s salad bowl for one at Swenson’s that was the size of a bathtub. The too-big-even-with-two-hands sandwiches where the fillings were three times thicker than the bread slices!

In this connection, a video of Sarah Palin with turkeys being processed in the background.

Joshua Rozenberg is probably the best-known legal correspondent in the UK. He writes for the Telegraph. Recently he has been publishing more on his own page there. The RSS feed is a good way of keeping up with legal news and comment. (New readers start here).

One of today’s pieces is Alleged Holocaust denier released.

The arrest warrant for Friedrich Töben was found to be vague and inadequate. Apparently if it were more specific, and it transpired that Töben denied the Holocaust in the UK as well as Germany, he would have a defence against extradition. The German authorities (represented by Melanie Cumberland) have given up their appeal.

Head of Legal thinks that Rozenberg’s new page is ‘something like a blawg’, and I agree:

Joshua Rozenberg has started something like a blawg on the Telegraph’s website. He specifically says it’s not a blog: though his reasons are wrong, if he thinks blogging means you write about yourself or simply recycle stories and opinions from other sources. I’m sorry he has such a limited view of what blogs can be, and surprised, given his wife’s success with blogging. But in a way he’s right – normally people would be able to comment on a blog, and you can’t on his site, which is a pity. It’d have been good to welcome him fully to the UK blawg world.

Many years ago I used to recommend Rozenberg’s The Search for Justice. An Anatomy of the Law to students. The updated edition was 1995. The book attempted to suggest how the English legal system could be improved, and its clear line made it a great way for non-lawyers to assimilate a lot of information about English law. It’s partly out of date now. Rozenberg’s book on Privacy and the Press, though pre-Mosley, looks like a good read, judging from the pages you can see on the amazon.co.uk site. Rozenberg has a way of writing readably about legal topics without condescending to the non-lawyer reader.

Online European library. The Europeana site is obviously down, but you can read about it and see a video here.

The Europeana site is temporarily not accessible due to overwhelming interest after its launch (10 million hits per hour).

We are doing our utmost to reopen Europeana in a more robust version as soon as possible.

We will be back by mid-December.

Today’s word is monorchic – it’s not true about the Albert Hall.

I have only ever heard a mixed version of that song, without the Albert Hall.

But who was Colonel Bogey? And what happened to the billy goat?

(Thanks to Trevor for the scholarly angle)

I have mentioned Flocke here before, but it was only at the beginning of November that I got round to seeing her. It was fairly sunny and she was asleep. It was the school holidays, and a mother kept saying to her child, ‘Sie ist eine Schlafmütze’ (which was slightly more tolerable than the man who was making snorting noises at the red river hogs).

This was just in time for this nice article on Knut, Flocke, and Co: the bear facts revealed by Birgit Clark in the online version of the Journal of Intellectual Property and Practice

Introduction with pictures and links at IPKat (but the article itself has pictures and links).

Here is the abstract:

Legal context: It appears that Germans just cannot get enough of their bears these days, whether it is cuddly Knut, Berlin zoo’s celebrity polar bear with a Vanity Fair magazine cover, cute Flocke, Nuremberg zoo’s polar bear cub with her own website and marketing machine, or little Wilbär, their understated polar bear cousin from the Stuttgart zoo. In the context of marketing the birth of high-profile zoo animals, some interesting legal issues arise.

Key points: The article aims to give an account of how the Germanic bear craze started and looks at the marketing and merchandise machinery involved. In particular, it discusses the trade mark disputes over polar bear cub Flocke, as decided by the Regional Court of Nuremberg-Fürth in March 2008, and the trade mark dispute over Austrian panda bear cub Fu Long.

Practical significance: The article examines some of the trade mark law issues surrounding the marketing of the birth of high profile zoo animals. It examines the financial worth of polar bear trade marks, the perils of public naming campaigns, and shows how serious problems can result from not taking trade mark protection seriously at an early stage.

The article also deals with the ‘problem bear’ Bruno, who has now been stuffed and can be seen in Munich.