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Just recently I was standing behind a man at a cash machine. He put in his card, typed his PIN number, waited, typed in how much cash he wanted, waited, took his card, took his cash, thanked the machine and walked off.

What does THAT tell you..!?

Spell checkers are dangerous, because many mis-spellings ARE words - if I mis-spell "their" as "there" a spell-checker will fail to pick it up. The grammar checker in Microsoft Word is an ABOMINATION, senselessly leaving ugly green lines all over texts I have prepared in which the grammar - if I dare say it - has been positively masterful! So there is no substitute for LEARNING good spelling and grammar.

Why is it important? Because language, rather like money, only "works" because there is a consensus. I would expect soon to get into trouble if I arbitrarily decided that my ten pound notes were worth twenty pounds and everyone else's five. And it is the same with language. One disregards the consensus at one's peril - "their" simply is spelled "their" and not "there". Of course, there is change and innovation in language, but, ironically, it only "takes" when a new consensus is arrived at.

It just makes me think of people standing up like idiot automatons.

Ice packs on the forhead, neck, wrists, anywhere where the blood runs close to the surface.

If it had happened earlier, in the 70s before Communism was deemed to have "failed", or in the 80s at the height of Regan/Thatcher-omics and the associated high temperature ideology of those times, then maybe a global recession would have changed some things, some thinking, some significant policy making. I myself have been saying (in the pub), half-jokingly, that capitalism has been shown to have failed, but no one understands me when I point out the discrepancy between intervention and the rule of market forces. "Of course they'll support the banks," I am told "in order to stop the economy from collapsing." But those in the west have grown too used to baubles and little comforts, and to those in the east the memory of the absurdities and privations of real communism on the ground are too recent. This ain't gonna bring around the revolution.