Lucky 13

Thanks very much to BenSix in the comments, for the heads up on Dave's appearance at the Editorial Intelligence blogging debate thing, in which he gives us a shout-out! Big up yourself Dave man!

One of the other comments DA makes is that his main problem with the blogosphere is not so much the criticism it makes of the commentariat as the fact that, to quote "in one single comment thread at Guido Fawkes, I was called a c**t 25 times" (the asterisks are the typographic equivalent of the bleep inserted by EI's web editors). With this in mind, I thought I'd see how we score on that metric:

Pretty well! We called Nick Cohen a c##t once (by allusion), Rod Liddle a c##t once (directly) and Chris Woodhead an "unspeakable c##t" once. We've also upbraided Nick Cohen for "calling everyone who disagrees with you a crpyto-fascist and a c##t" (perhaps hypocritically in context) and suggested that he would only be happy with Newsnight if Jeremy Paxman were to call Ming Campbell a Saddam-loving c##t.

We suggested that Niccolo Machiavelli's advice could be summed up in part as "be a total c##t" (I think fair enough, although political philosophers might suggest there's more to it than that) and adapted a Peter Cook sketch in order to put the C-word in the mouth of a personalised "Euston". We also reported on Rod Liddle having, possibly (quoted in a Guido Fawkes post on the Spectator party) called Dave "that c##t Aaronovich[sic]". I think this might have been the comments thread he was talking about. I suggested that "the project of being a c##t about the war" was a part of Decency that Aaro didn't take part in, and we suggested that a picture of Norman Finkelstein could be found in the Dictionary of British Colloquialism under the heading "do you have to be quite such a c##t about it?".

Unnaccountably, we described AA Gill as "the noted drama critic and c##t" (untrue - he is a restaurant and TV critic; we apologise unreservedly) and suggested that Tom Conti "called Aaro, at length, a c##t", in what I maintain is a reasonable summary of the relevant Ham & High interview, but where our Readers' Editor found that Conti did not actually use that word and so censured us.

That's it. I'm surprised that I've haven't used the word in the context of the Prime Directive and suspect that this is because the site search only picks up front page posts rather than comments.

Update: Mindful of our younger readers (and also to avoid having to change the post title to "Lucky 25"), I have redacted the relevant words from this post. Readers wishing to enjoy the original unexpurgated version can copy it into word and do CTRL-H to replace "##" with "un". Apple users, you're on your own.