We confess that we are not entirely sure what this means, but we think Natasha’s research topic is admirable. If you’d like to assist, click here for the survey. Natasha confirms that all data obtained will be treated in confidence. 

What to make of Zoe Margolis, author of Girl with a One-Track Mind? As the New Statesman reports, Margolis wrote an article for the Independent on Sunday on 7 March in which she described being outed by the Sunday Times as the author of her anonymous sex blog in 2006. Somewhat remarkably, she now finds herself at odds with the Sindy over precisely the same article. The reason? It was the headline, m’lud, the headline.

A spokesman for Margolis told the Press Gazette that the piece was originally headlined: “I was a hooker who became an agony aunt”, but that the word ‘hooker’ was changed to “good-time girl” in a later edition. Margolis understandably takes exception to her first edition billing, saying “I’m absolutely distraught by this damage to my reputation both professionally and personally”.

Apparently, legal proceedings are underway. Margolis would seem certain to obtain an apology from the Sindy, perhaps even damages, too, if she wants them. But seasoned PR commentators would not deny the helpfulness of this fracas in terms of publicity for Margolis. Her latest book, Exposed, has just hit the shelves, and thus this dispute perhaps proves the truth of the old adage about clouds and silver linings, one which, as every good English Literature student knows, is derived from a masque by John Milton in honour of chastity.

When Josef Fritzl’s appalling crimes came to light, the media went to town. Every newspaper, sundry magazines and a plethora of television news items were devoted to the evil Austrian.

Now, under our noses, we have “the British Fritzl“. He can’t be named “for legal reasons” but we doubt that’ll be the case for long. As and when this hideous man’s identity is known, will the media investigate his wrongdoing with such fervour as it visited on his Austrian counterpart?

We find ourselves shuttling at ludicrous pace from task to task on this wind-chilled day but earlier, as we sped among the streets of the West End in a black cab, we espied a Number 19 bus. This, in turn, put us in mind of the words of the artist John Minton to a young student, no less a figure than Breon O’Casey, the son of the great Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey:

“It’s no good being inspired if you’re sitting on top of the Number 19 bus. You must be in front of your easel.”

In other words, discipline is as much a part of success as creativity. As we speed to yet another assignment, we suspect this applies in the professions as much as the arts.

Image courtesy of Breon O’Casey.

There is a simple PR value to immaculate spelling – it means that you disseminate your message accurately. In journalism, too, good spelling is vital, for without it the journalist’s task – to report, observe and illumine – is undermined.

With these thoughts in mind, we commend a new online survey by the Spelling Society, in association with HoldtheFrontPage, to find out whether journalists’ spelling has got better or worse over the past decade. To take part, click this link.

However, much as we admire the survey, we cannot but admonish the Spelling Society for some of the content on its home page. It starts breezily enough:

The Spelling Society started in 1908 and has the aim of raising awareness of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling and to promote remedies to improve literacy. The Spelling Society publishes leaflets, newsletters, journals, books and bulletins to promote our aim. We also feature in the media on TV, on radio and in print.

So far, so good, though ‘aim’ ought really to be plural. But we are aghast at the split infinitive below:

A short list of the problems caused by the irregularity of English spelling starts with children being taught the alphabet and finding that it is a poor guide on how to reliably pronounce the written form or reproducing spoken words in writing.

The argument is weakened not merely by the split infinitive, but the blend of the infinitive form with the present participle. Oh dear. Next up we have:

This leads inevitably to poor results in other areas of learning, as without literacy competency, no child can master other subjects.

What is ‘literacy competency’? What’s wrong with ‘competent literacy’? Sadly, the downward spiral continues:

Apart from the loss in terms of peoples? working lives there are other costs associated with remedial classes, additional spelling classes, all of which would be better used in teaching other subjects in a world that requires a skilled and knowledgeable work force.

What is going on here? The language is clunky but worse is the rogue question mark, presumably doubling as an apostrophe. Trouble is, it’s not an apostrophe and its appearance is arguably just as bad, if not worse, than a misspelt word.

However, despite such apparently egregious errors we prefer not to castigate the Spelling Society too much. In the old days, there were fetters galore before writing appeared for public consumption. Now the nationals would prefer not to have subs on the payroll and every journalist is expected to be able to write, sub and publish his copy, sans scrutiny and free of mistakes. The Spelling Society’s website would appear to have evaded a third party check to ensure that all is as it should be, but these things happen. Indeed, we confess that even here, amid the emanations from the Swordplay labyrinth, the occasional error creeps in…

(Please tell us if you spot any. Sometimes we toil alone and go a little wordblind.)

But can television be a reliable indicator of social trends? After all, if we go by televisual popularity, we love Simon Cowell’s programmes rather more than we do Question Time or anything featuring Jeremy Paxman, and that simply can’t be right.

We suspect that the ever reliable Mrs Moneypenny might have an answer. Her perceptive columns in the FT Weekend Magazine are as enjoyable as ever, and last Saturday’s illumined the ‘Can women have it all?’ question in Mrs M’s inimitable way. Here she is on whether or not it is a woman’s world:

When I read yet another piece bemoaning the lack of women on the boards of FTSE companies, I just sigh. The lack of female representation does not indicate lack of capability, or some giant conspiracy by men to dominate the world of public companies. It just shows that women are too smart; they have worked out what it takes and don’t want to make those sacrifices. Most of us would prefer to prioritise our families, or to have time to go to the gym, or care for our aged parents, or even just to read a book, rather than run a company with all its associated hassles.

Perhaps, then, it is a woman’s world – even if they’re outnumbered two to one by men on the small screen.

(While we’re on the subject, does anyone know who Mrs Moneypenny really is?)

When was the last time you, as an employee, consulted your company’s handbook of rules and procedures? Did you ever even read it in the first place?

If you’re an employer, when did you last bother to look at said tome? Or, heaven forbid, update it?

And between both employers and employees, is there some subtle PR to be had in the humble employee handbook? A little give and take which might work to both sides’ advantage?

Perhaps. Certainly, according to this Texas lawyer, it’s time that employee handbooks caught up with the early 21st century. As Michael Maslanka, the managing partner of Ford & Harrison in Dallas, writes, “employees understand out of necessity they can no longer be just fungible cogs … [while] … workplace cultures of the future will focus on autonomy and not rules”. But, citing “Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us” by Daniel Pink or “Linchpin: Are you Indispensable?”by Seth Godin, Maslanka says that the architecture of employee handbooks is more suited to the 20th century than the 21st.

Here in the UK, we might add that some handbooks we have seen are better suited to the Victorian era, but be that as it may, Maslanka’s point is, essentially, one of interactivity. In the modern, social media era, employee handbooks need to be more in the nature of a two-process than a series of edicts and stipulations.

For example, under a company’s ‘integrity policy’ (which in itself is not exactly an everyday occurence on these shores), Maslanka avows that the employee handbook should be drafted to be helpful rather than prescriptive. He puts it thus:

“What should an employee new to a department do if she sees possible unethical conduct but wants to fit in? That’s the scenario in Mary C. Gentile’s article in the March 2010 Harvard Business Review, “Keeping Your Colleagues Honest.” She suggests the employee treat the possible ethical conflict as a business conflict, and stick to the facts. The employee should stay away from the high-horse approach of telling others they are unethical and she is ethical. Employers’ lawyers easily can incorporate these simple, cutting-edge ideas into company policies. Yes, retain the rules and policies, but link them to underlying values and provide help with how to deal with them.”

That sounds eminently sensible, with upsides all round, but wait a minute – what if you’re an employee and, having perused your company’s employee handbook, you find it wanting, perhaps even unethical?

You should take up the cause – with due diplomacy – remembering that you may not be alone. Maslanka’s rallying cry ends thus: “Let’s have an employee handbook revolution - now.”

Image of a revolution for display purposes only courtesy of TaranRampersad.

We’ve been enjoying a ticklish perusal of Overheard in Court, an American website dedicated to absurd, amusing and incongruous courtroom utterances. Here’s a taster:

Employer supervisor testifying in gender discrimination claim:

Supervisor: “I don’t discriminate against them – them women – just because they have them – them things.”

Attorney: “What? Breasts?”

Supervisor: “No! Them kids – I know they can’t do the same job because they have to take off work all the time…”

We can safely say, without fear of the libel lawyers, that such things are routinely overheard in the law courts of England and Wales, too. Indeed, we bring you this slice of cadaverous badinage from a coroner’s court in East Anglia:

Coroner: You say, Mr X [a well-known pathologist] that you examined the deceased and found, inter alia, that his gall bladder was intact and, moreover, capable of functioning perfectly before death. Is that so?

Pathologist: Yes, that is the case.

Coroner: And yet, Mrs Y [a lady in viduity], you contend that Mr X’s finding cannot be correct. Please tell us why?

Mrs Y [gesturing to her solicitor, who is clutching a sheaf of medical notes]: Because my husband had his gall bladder removed 10 years ago.

Coroner: What do you say to that, Mr X?

Mr X: Er…

Talking of the coroners’ courts, isn’t it about time someone wrote a novel exploring their curious ways? Or is there one? We shall investigate, gall bladders intact (or otherwise).

Image of a coroner’s bureau courtesy of Thomas Hawk. We don’t think it was taken in Britain.

Yesterday we brought you news of NOWNESS. Yesterday’s news has not cooled – in fact, we rather wish we were trawling around the NOWNESS site again – but now we alert you to something completely different: the ‘facial recognition phone’.

Recognizr, developed by a Swedish company called The Astonishing Tribe, uses facial recognition software to enable users to find names, telephone numbers and addresses of complete strangers by simply taking a picture of someone and hitting the ‘Recognize’ button. If that sounds dubious on any number of levels, we agree. Stalkers will have a field day with it, so too others whose intent is nefarious such as burglars, dodgy tabloid journalists and, if they still exist, corrupt policemen.

Indeed, as Bruce Carton at Legal Blog Watch suggests, Recognizr could be doubly worrying if combined with Please Rob Me: “It strikes me that a combination of Recognizr and Please Rob Me would be particularly problematic. Users of both platforms could theoretically use Please Rob Me to find out when a person is not home, then use Recognizr to analyze the ‘not home’ person’s avatar to learn where they live.”

But is there a PR upside to The Astonishing Tribe’s astonishing invention? Yes, of course. We just can’t think of it right now. And talking of now, a glance at NOWNESS reveals that Icelandic musician Jonsi is all the rage. We confess that his PR had not reached these parts – in other words, we’d never heard of him. But just imagine – if we saw him in the street and had a Recognizr phone in our possession, we could take a snap and find out who he is. Or something like that.

We’re quite taken by NOWNESS, the new online magazine about luxury brands recently launched by Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy (LVMH). If we sound surprised, we are, for our initial thoughts were (a) that NOWNESS is not a very good title and (b) that anyone who avows the value of “information relevance“, as do LVMH, is cursed by an irresistible obfuscatory impulse.

But a trawl around NOWNESS makes for pleasant, not to say informative, reading. NOWNESS says that it’ll present “a highly creative and technologically advanced approach to showcasing the best of fashion, art, culture and travel”, with content updated daily by a team which is editorially independent of LVMH, and it’s as good as its word. Checking out this page, we encountered something very similar to the Guardian’s new Zeitgeist section, but regardless of who got there first it looks slick and appealing with some good, intriguing stories, not least this one, on the Gentlemen of Bacongo.

Hats off to LVMH and NOWNESS. We doubt we’ll ever be convinced by “information relevance”, but NOWNESS is growing on us already.

The arresting image is by Viviane Sassen and features on NOWNESS.