Web Monitor
15:11 UK time, Tuesday, 2 February 2010
A celebration of the riches of the web.
Today in Web Monitor: graduation day with the queen of the wizards, Geordie trucker confessions and the emergence of the "spokespirate".
• An old JK Rowling commencement speech at Harvard has been buzzing around the web since it was . After wondering what pearls of wisdom she could pass on to Harvard graduates, Ms Rowling decided they wouldn't know enough about failure because, as she puts it, "[t]he fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure."
She explains that if it weren't for failing "to an epic scale", she wouldn't have written the Harry Potter books:
"An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
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"I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged."
• If one ever wonders about how a tabloid journalist looks back at his or her work, Web Monitor can offer a little ; he reveals his part in a "slur" of Mo Mowlam while at the Daily Express:
"Now, it wasn't me, back in my Fleet Street days, who wrote in 1997 that she looked like 'an only slightly effeminate Geordie trucker'.
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"That was the late Lynda Lee Potter, in the Daily Mail. But it was my story in the Daily Express the day before about Mo's dramatic change in appearance that got the lady columnists sharpening their claws...
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"Naturally, my memory was jogged when I watched the Channel 4 film, Mo, starring the brilliant Julie Walters, and I think I probably cringed in my front room as I heard her read out the Lynda Lee Potter 'Geordie trucker' column in horror."
• has been carefully documenting new words for the last seven years. He's found a new word that has tickled him: "spokespirate", found in an :
"'They are the ones pirating mankind for many years,' a spokespirate tells Agencia Matriz del Sur."
Mr Liberman adds that he suspects the word isn't completely original, but that he hasn't seen it used in reference to "ship-jacking" pirates. Language Log, incidentally, is also mentioned in about that newspaper's use of the "gate" suffix to indicate a scandal.
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