Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
How do you feel about the word "trendy"? Ok, it's not as cool as but these days even "cool" isn't very cool.
Yet it's a word you might mutter as a compliment in the company of friends without fearing you'd committed social suicide.
In the hands of the press, or certain newspapers at least, when applied to teaching, it's an insult of the highest order. Classrooms, after all, are places where old-fashioned techniques such as discipline are back in, er, fashion.
Witness yesterday's Daily Mail: "Charles launches fight back against trendy teaching".
Today's Times deploys the "T" word with equal venom on a different story: "Private schools set to abandon 'too trendy' national curriculum".
But there are bigger fish to fry in today's Times. So far, Paper Monitor has maintained a discreet distance from coverage of the Meredith Kercher case, despite the press going to town on it.
But sometimes the sensationalism of the headline just doesn't match up to the story itself. Take today's Times which tells us "Meredith suspect wrote to mother but only talked of going shopping".
Yet, in the story itself, we're told the suspect, Amanda Knox, told in her letter that she was "shocked" and "nervous" and that she couldn't "think about anything else"… before going on to mention shopping.
Finally, honourable mention to the subs at Metro for recycling a joke that dates from the Jurassic (Park) era. On the man who spotted an errant dinosaur bone at the Natural History Museum, which millions of others hasn't noticed… "No one saurus".