Norfolk Blogger has quite rightly awarded Headline of the Week to the BBC for its:Great tits cope well with warmingMalcolm Redfellow's World Service also notes this story and goes on to inform us that the RSPB has banished the word "cock" from its website. This leads him to reminisce:
Long years ago, Malcolm worked alongside a lovely, if slightly too-innocent-for-her-own-good teacher. She insisted on using Ian Serraillier's 1956 great story, The Silver Sword, as a class reader. (It may subsequently have been edited or re-written: it certainly seems to have gained a new title, Escape from Warsaw). The problem was that one of the characters has a pet chicken, and this (as Malcolm painfully remembers) provokes the immortal line:
"Jan placed his cock on the table."
As soon as the set of books was removed from the stock-cupboard, Malcolm, would take great care monitoring the class's progress in reading the story. He fully appreciated that he would be summoned to suppress the minor riot when the psychological moment arrived.
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Geoffrey Trease recalled that, writing a novel about the movement for Italian unification, and wishing to convey that Mazzini, a modest man, disliked the grand surroundings he had been placed in, he wrote, then hastily revised, the words "Mazzini sought out the smallest room in the house to use as an office..."
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