5月 31 2007
Nick Roddick described the reaction of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days winning Palme d’Or in Guardian:
The film world’s collective jaw may have dropped on Sunday night when 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days – a Romanian film about abortion with no stars and costing under half a million pounds – walked off with the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
如果翻译成中文：大约是“全世界的电影人都在满地找眼镜”。
BBC Newsnight Review 的三位嘉宾的预测也错了，但还不算太离谱。《潜水钟与蝴蝶》得了最佳导演奖。
5月 19 2007
《卫报》(The Guardian)的报纸版面设计我认为是英国报纸中最好的，然而，错字也不少。出版时间紧迫，也许出错难免，但是如果评论版头版的题头位置出现明显的错误，实在有点说不过去了。
5月 17 2007
我在找有关汉语学习的网站资料时，见过一个很有趣的网站叫 Signese 。作者是一个生活在北京的英国人，搜集街头巷尾随处可见的汉字。有些我们视而不见的路标、招贴、涂鸦的可爱或好笑之处，那些学习汉语反而更加敏锐地捕捉到了。汉字本身的优美和汉语的含糊简约和多重语义也提供了许多可能性。
受此启发，我想把日常生活中见到的有趣的文字、图片、标志摘录下来，主题不限。欢迎加入，可以把你的照片发到 newlight at Gmail.com。标题就叫“咬文嚼字”吧。
5月 16 2007
Guardian’s Simon Hoggart described the crowd who support woman MP Harriet Harman’s contest to be Gordon Brown’s deputy.
She had backing from 61 MPs. Of these, 31 are women. They, with a handful of men, marched into a committee room at the Commons like Japanese tourists who has lost the lady with the flag. They knew it was important, but they weren’t quite clear why they were there.
Joke in expense of Harriet Harman’s gender…or the ladies who support her perhaps?
5月 12 2007
专栏作家Bernard Levin在1994年布莱尔成为工党领导人之后在《泰晤士报》上的文章，向我们演示知识分子是如何骂人的：
Labour at last has a modern leader ready to sweep to power and end this sorry era.
The longer and more frequently I contemplate Mr Blair, the more I like the cut of his jib. This has nothing to do with the alternative; I long ago concluded that the present Government was worm-eaten, exhausted, dishonest, incompetent, lazy, mendacious, ignorant, rotten, false, disreputable, deceitful, unsavoury, squalid, abominable, soiled, piratical, shifty, discreditable, infamous, improper, obscene, hateful, impure, degraded, dilapidated, shabby, grovelling, discredited, renownless, tarnished, disgraced, shameless, creeping, abject, two-faced, unscrupulous, villainous, treacherous, untrustworthy, prevaricating, sinister, crawling, insincere, fishy, spurious, unclean, felonious, infamous, venal, base, vile, bribable, rancid, disloyal, scheming, unsavoury, sickening, fetid, nauseating, putrid, defaulting, mouldering, evil, vicious, damnable, maleficent, wrong, ineffectual, mean, inferior, contemptible, superficial, irrelevant, expendable, powerless, pathetic, nugatory, impotent, jumped-up, cheap, insalubrious, flea-ridden, unsound, nasty, baneful, foul-tonged, cursed, unwarranted, execrable, damned, abnormal, unreasonable, virtueless, peccant, sinful, unworthy, hopeless, incorrigible, tergiversating, brutalised, nefarious, culpable, scandalous, worthless, flagitious, gross, indefensible and unpardonable to say the least. But Blair, as far as I can see, is to be found on his own feet, not measuring by the scabrous (I missed that one) Lilliputians now arrayed against him.
不过如果你仔细看，他还是重复使用了 infamous 和 insavoury 两次。
5月 05 2007
After the loss of election in England, Scotland and Wales of various degress, the retiring Tony Blair was seen being interviewed in some nondescriptive office, with a mug of tea in hand. The Times’s Ann Treneman wrote:
Mr Blair, who denies he is in denial, denied things were so bad. Then, casually, he dropped his soundbite cluster bomb. “It’s been a dreadful set of results for the Liberal Democrats,” he said chattily. “And the Tories have not broken through, particularly in the northern cities.” Within seconds, this was being flashed up as BREAKING NEWS. The mug had struck again.
Soundbite is a weapon a politican must master.
