Category: The use of Language
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The Parrot Views the Earth from Afar
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The UK General Election presently in progress begs the question whether there is any difference in quality of democratic process between a Referendum and an Election. Both seem to involve a lot of lying at high volume, a lot of propaganda ditto, and various other forms of manipulation and trickery – whatever their perpetrators can…
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The Parrot Mourns the Loss of Home
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The Parrot is awash in a flood of untruth and unrule, as the UK’s general election gets under way. The result when it comes would appear to be a matter of pure random chance, or skill, or criminality, in the underhand use of social media to manipulate people, no more truthworthy than a drawing of…
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The Parrot Considers the Right Wing Press
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The right wing press were chorusing their criticism of Parliament for doing its duty in examining the work of our dodgy Executive and holding it to account. According to the press, MP’s were betraying “the will of the People” by not rubber-stamping what Mr Toad has come up with – however misinformed that same People…
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The Parrot Examines the Use of Words
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The previous Saturday had been billed as yet another “crunch” Brexit day, and I had been ready to face the worst. But, as things turned out, the Toad was left frustrated on that occasion. Today, however, another crunch had come. Anxiety had returned. Was Brexit truly a set of developments that might still happen, probably…
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An Exhibition of Bilingual Poems
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I’m uploading below a set of photographs of an exhibition I organised a few months ago, in Clifton Cathedral, Bristol. The picture above is just one example. Several pictures show, as this does, how the exhibition looked in its setting. Several more show single poems close up, the words made somehow even stronger in their…
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The Parrot Still in London
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This is one of a rapid succession of these rhyming commentaries, written during a sequence of events even more furious, momentous and disturbing than usual. I composed it quite early on Thursday 26th September. The previous night., in the House of Commons, only just back from America, following the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling, Mr Toad…
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The Toad Falls Foul of the Law
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The UK’s Supreme Court has just finished hearing the Government’s appeal against the Scottish High Court’s finding that Johnson misled the Queen as to his reasons for closing down the Parliament. It was not a matter of creating more time to prepare the Queen’s Speech. Instead it was to stop parliamentary scrutiny of his Brexit…
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The Parrot and the Clowns
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The Parrot has joined the circus, remember. He’s still there and in the stanza above, he’s reporting back from a conference of clowns he heard today. All familiar shapes are now in question. In the UK, Brexit alone has been causing a great number of them to buckle. Democracy is one. What is democracy, after…