Here’s a salutary tale. The past few days Blanco’s Blog has gone viral, thanks to the occurrence in a one-off post last summer – a film review of Hobo with a shotgun – of the word penectomy. Shit, I’ve done it again.

There are thousands of people out there, it seems, who get terribly excited when they get a sniff of a word like ****ctomy, and they then let all their chums know, and on it goes. A few of the more specialist sites, it seems, advocate different forms of self-mutilation, including auto-castration.

I don’t know what other clinical terms I should be avoiding, but no doubt if people send in suggestions, we might between us break my new all-time record.

On second thoughts, please don’t.

On a lighter note, I have been spending a lot of time toing and froing to the fair city of Birmingham these past two weeks. What friendly and plausible folk those Brummies are! Why on earth do they get such bad press? It can’t be due to their irrepressible chirpy good humour. It must be that, in sociolinguistic terms, they speak the most maligned and ‘disfavoured form of British English’, according to all opinion polls and surveys carried out since time began. According to one source:

A study was conducted in 2008 where people were asked to grade the intelligence of a person based on their accent and the Brummie accent was ranked as the least intelligent accent. It even scored lower than being silent …

Oops. People are such bigots. An entertaining and fair account intended to dispel negative stereotyping of all things Brummie can be found here.

Meanwhile, as we in Cardiff gear up for the Grand Slam showdown with France on Saturday, the London press goes on an adoration fest for the ‘England’ rugby team. Sure, the defeat of France on Sunday was admirable, but do The Times, Telegraph, Guardian and Independent really need to spend pages and pages describing the Sweet Chariot revival, and only a few column inches on the champions-in-waiting, when, after all, the best the Saeson can reasonably hope for is second place?