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Paper Monitor

11:24 UK time, Wednesday, 28 October 2009

A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.

We're used to things being so clever that they qualify as genius - Stephen Hawking, for instance, and those gun corkscrews that suck the thing out of the bottle in one motion.

But what about things that are so stupid they can be categorised as genius? Big Mouth Billy Bass and burglars who leave their wallet at the scene of the crime among them.

Well prepare for a towering example of the latter category on page 37 of today's Sun. It's a four paragraph story about a survey that suggests men with high testosterone levels don't like sharing.

Headline?

"Divide 'n bonk her"

Epic. Magnificent. Gloriously naff. This headline is everything tabloid newspapers aspire to.

Elsewhere, in the Daily Mirror, they're battling to make a coinage stick. Sometimes a bit of journalese takes root immediately and passes into the wider lexicon. WAGs being one example. Blair babes was another.

The Mirror is following the latter example with its pushing of "Cameron's cuties" in reference to the Conservative leader's battle to get more women MPs. The Daily Mail is also in on the act.

From a quick search of the LexisNexis newspaper database, it seems Matthew Norman coined the term in 2006 in the London Evening Standard to apply more generally to any photogenic candidate. Paper Monitor prediction: This won't stick.

Something has gone wrong over at the Daily Star. The famous Text Maniacs section usually provides a refreshing break from such concepts as "correct spelling", "coherent thought" and "the news".

But among all the X Factor rumination, bad jokes and requests for Abi Titmuss pictures, a rogue serious comment seems to have escaped the net.

"u rightly said prostate cancer kills 10,000 men a year, but u didn't mention that it gets little or no government funding - unlike breast cancer," texts James from Lancashire.

What's going on?

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