Rod Liddle

OxfordDictionaries.com has today announced that is adding words like "awesomesauce" and "manspreading" to the dictionary. But what about banning fatuous words and phrases? Here are some of Rod Liddle's suggestions...  1. Battling my demons  It was demons who held down that actress/pop singer/reality TV star and rammed four kilos of charlie up her left nostril leaving her with the IQ of an aspidistra and, alas, sans septum. It was demons who injected Philip Seymour Hoffman with skag. The same creatures regularly waylay the former footballer Paul Gascoigne and siphon several litres of vodka down his throat. And it was demons, a whole bunch of them, who grappled with Brooks Newmark’s penis and ensured it was transmitted digitally to the fictitious woman of his choice.

What can we as a society do about the relentless harassment of women by terrifying men? Menacing men, threatening men, priapic men. Something must be done — and quickly. I reached this conclusion after reading a deeply distressing article by the Guardian columnist Daisy Buchanan, who announced that she has imposed a curfew on herself after a series of deeply unpleasant incursions by bestial males. ‘I can’t believe women have to live like this in 2015,’ Ms Buchanan lamented, having revealed that she has also given up dancing in case the same sort of thing happens when she is on the way home from wherever it is she dances.

The BBC’s Creative Director, Alan Yentob, seems to have spent the last week or so dashing from studio to studio in an attempt to influence the corporation’s broadcasters from saying nasty stuff about a charity of which he was, until it imploded, chairman. The incompetently-managed Kids Company is now mercifully defunct. Yentob has subsequently admitted to having contacted Newsnight before the programme broadcast an investigation into the charity. He also harangued BBC correspondent Lucy Manning and stood in the cubicle watching as Today attempted to cover the story. If anyone else in the BBC had demonstrated such a magnificently brazen conflict of interest, they’d be out. But as a former senior exec told me: 'Yentob is Teflon.

Have you been microaggressive recently? My guess is that in some way or another, you have, you bastards. If you are not sure that you have been microaggressive, here’s a very good piece indeed by Brendan O’Neill which delineates the sort of thing that might be considered microaggressive by some third-rate academic or the sort of people who run student unions in our universities. Laugh now. Later microaggression will be an everyday part of our lives. These people are winning.

In another blow for freedom and the protection of the vulnerable, Conservative MP Mark Spencer has suggested that anti-terror legislation should be used to punish teachers who hold ‘old-fashioned’ views about homosexuality and perhaps divest themselves of these views to their pupils. I assume this could mean simply reading out bits of the Bible — that pungent little verse in Leviticus, perhaps, with its reference to ‘detestable acts’. Or maybe he would be OK reading out bits from Leviticus if he then made it clear that the Levite priests, and God Himself, were totally wrong on this issue and that homosexuality is absolutely lovely. But never mind the Levites.

'Rude, bone idle... and cosseted by the welfare state! Chinese teachers' damning verdict on British children after spending a month in UK classrooms. Yes – just about right, I reckon. Except, of course, the English head teacher at the school thinks the Chinese are completely wrong and that their teaching methods are boring. And that we need to show the kids respect, m’kay? My suspicion is that we show the kids too much respect and that teachers are not there to be clownish entertainer, to pander.

Tomorrow sees the start of the Special Olympic World Games in Los Angeles. I’m sure you’ll be watching with great interest. Just one question: what does the word 'special', as used by the event organisers, mean, exactly? Is it to alert us to the possibility that the athletes taking part are even better than those who take part in the ordinary, run-of-the-mill, Olympics? And if they are not, then again, what does the word special mean in this context? Isn’t it all a bit condescending?