Salut!

Minding our language: the word of 2014 is vape, not selfie

A pre-vape drag

I think my latest column on language for The National, Abu Dhabi speaks for itself ...

Every year produces buzzwords and a chronicler of the distinguishing features of 2014 could be forgiven for thinking selfie was a prime example.

The Christmas Truces of the First World War

A very happy Christmas to all Salut! readers. This seems a seasonal enough posting, more or less what will have appeared in the last day or so at The National, Abu Dhabi ...

New to NYC: lost in Manhattan, cursed by Lauren Bacall

Colin Randall writes: Seventeen readers ticked "Like" when Bill Taylor wrote the first article in a series I can still call New to NYC, though this may change if future contributions stray geographically. Here is the second instalment ...

Press payments to officials, and the cruel and unusual punishment of Lynn Gaffney

I have disabled comments for this posting to avoid potential legal mishaps, not least having seen what others, including Hacked Off's site, and social media are prepared to publish despite a clear risk of prejudice. If you wish to have your say send it to this address and, if I am satisfied it is safe, I will approve it ...

To err is human. Lynn Gaffney erred when, many years ago as the then partner of a prison officer, Scott Chapman, she allowed him to use her bank account for payments from newspapers for information he passed to them.

Judge Charles Wide erred, when sentencing Gaffney for this error at the Old Bailey last Thursday, by failing to make himself properly understood. As The Guardian's correction put it on Saturday, his words were "universally misheard", by court officials and police as well as reporters present, so that everyone believed he had sent her to prison for 13 weeks.

Journalist X, Judge Jeffreys and flawed justice

I have disabled comments for this posting to avoid potential legal mishaps. If you wish to have your say send it to this address and, if I am satisfied it is safe, I will publish it ...

I must be careful here, when commenting on the outcome of the case in which (1) a prison officer, (2) his girlfriend and (3) a journalist from the News of the World today faced sentence for offences arising from (1) selling stories to newspapers, (2) allowing her bank account to be used for payments and (3) for being the reporter who agreed the payments in two of many more cases.

At the Old Bailey, Judge Charles Wide jailed (1) for three-and-a-half years. This is 11 months longer than the sentence he considered appropriate in August for a man found guilty of possessing terrorist material and who admitted jumping bail. According to the report I saw, the man used YouTube to warn of a terrorist attack on the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.

Nick Parker: never a criminal

Stop press: three-month suspended sentence for the charge on which he was convicted ....

Nick Parker is one of the reporters I remember with most affection and admiration from my time "on the road".

That he worked for The Sun, whereas I nominally had the status of a broadsheet journalist, mattered not. As Jeremy Deedes, the son of the late, revered Lord (Bill) Deedes, once said to me when he was managing editor of the Telegraph: "We all muddy our feet in much the same water."

In other words, all sections of the media - including the often sanctimonious broadcasters - covered similar events. Never forget that in seeking to trash reporters and photographers doorstepping Diana, Princess of Wales at the gym and elsewhere, TV crews doorstepped her too.

The Belgian question resurfaces in study of the reach of Islamic State propaganda

Here's an interesting study of the levels of support for Islamic State around the world, as gleaned from painstaking analysis of blogs, tweets and Facebook messages written in Arabic but originating in non-Muslim countries as well as the Islamic world ...

Support for ISIL is stronger among Arabic speakers in the West than those living at the heart of the zones of conflict, according to researchers who studied months of SOCIAL media messages and online comments.

More than two million blog posts and messages were analysed by Voices from the Blogs, a team of academics from Italy’s Milan university.

With Jeremy Thorpe as his murder conspiracy trial lay ahead ...

I was sad but unsurprised to hear of the death of the former Liberal party leader Jeremy Thorpe at 85. He had been suffering from Parkinson's disease for so long that he did well to reach such a grand age.

Back when I was a youngish reporter on The Daily Telegraph, Thorpe pre-occupied my life for much of the early part of my 29-year career with that newspaper.

As most people with a grasp of current affairs or British political history will know, he was accused in the late 1970s of conspiracy to murder a former model, Norman Scott, who claimed he and Thorpe had a sexual relationship between 1961 and 1963 at a time when homosexual acts, crazily, were illegal.

Joshua Wong: the lightweight whose punch rattles Hong Kong and Beijing

While preparing a profile of Hong Kong's pro-democracy student leader Joshua Wong*, I misread a reference to the way Tiananmen Square radicalised his own approach to political activism and imagined him watching the events on television as an adolescent. But, of course,that was 1989 and he was not even born; indeed, he was still in nappies when the British handed over Hong Kong to China. Here is what I had to say about this remarkable young man ...

Song of the Day: Tony Capstick's comedy genius enriches the folk diet

Please allow me to introduce Salut! readers to what is happening at the folk/folk-rock offshoot Salut! Live.

In the summer of 2011 I ran a series called Song of the Day, which presented video clips of the various British, Irish, French, American and Canadian folkies whose music has given me such pleasure over the years.

Before the series petered out, having exhausted its compiler, the list of artists featured was a long one (see the footnote) of which I was rather proud. But there was one comedy interlude, a delicious slice of northern humour from the late Tony Capstick.