Dogwash

John Terry, a professional association football player, has been accused, in the wake of what he apparently considered to have been a highly unsatisfactory interaction with Anton Ferdinand, another professional association football player, of using "racist" language. The precise phrase used is, as far as I can tell, not yet in the public domain, but if speculation is correct it will be some variant of "fucking black cunt". (Insert asterisks to taste.)

So what? Or, if you prefer, so fucking what? If Terry had lost his rag with Wayne Rooney and called him a "stupid short-arsed granny-fucker", would we all be wringing our hands over it?

Now the regrettably deteriorating Harry's Place is getting in on the act, cross-posting a piece on the phrase "Jew goal" from the po-faced indignation-mongers of the CST. New one on me, but then I no spikka da futebol. Apparently it's a particular kind of manœuvre designed to deceive the goalkeeper.

Gordon Ben Et, the Israeli Minister for Offence-taking, should be alerted at once, so that Mossad agents can be despatched to kidnap Arsène Wenger and bring him to trial for permitting anti-Semitic playing tactics.


Back in the days before the computer was king, us office wallahs used to keep groups of related paper documents together using treasury tags. (I'd better not call them India tags or I'll get into even more trouble.)


One of these little beasties was threaded through a hole in the top left-hand corner of each document, binding the group together. They were more effective than paper clips, which could only group together a handful of thin documents and which slid off too easily: not what you want when you have a two-inch thick pile of papers carefully sorted into order.

When the document lacked a suitable hole, you used one of these

to create one. It is known officially as a one-hole punch or single-hole punch. But to me, for reasons I have never quite fathomed, it was always a "pair of Jewish scissors". And people understood what I meant when I used the phrase. It was a mildly jokey ethnic stereotype turned into an everyday term, like French letter or Spanish custom. It didn't mean that I was planning to set up a gas-chamber on Hampstead Heath.

In any case, I'm reliably informed that the French horn responds well to antibiotics.

Grow up.