Samizdata

When I arrived home from work yesterday I discovered a package had arrived for me. I suspected that it was a Christmas present from my sister, and this was later confirmed. I opened it, and found this.

Yes, that’s right. It’s a clock that tells the time in binary, using flashing blue LEDs. To tell the truth, it has a nice “dawn of computing” feel about it, harkening back to the days when input devices were more primitive. Of course, they didn’t have blue LEDs back in the dawn of computing (or even in 1990 for that matter) but I will forgive that.

Alas, I can only conclude that my sister knows me too well.

(Actually, it only sort of tells the time in binary. Each vertical row of LEDs gives the binary for one decimal digit of the time. So the time as shown in the photograph is 21:26:25).

Yes, it had to happen: a man has named a police dog in a lawsuit.

Woof!

(Thanks to the marvellous Overlawyered blog for the story).

Granted his early appearances with Take That were aimed squarely at the pink pound, but that is a historic video persona. Robbie Williams himself is virtually a by-word for, how should I put it… cocky, pop-star heterosexuality. So much so, it seems pretty darn odd that even gossipy, downmarket, national newspapers should choose to print flimsy stories attributing to him a history of casual gay sex. The sequel, however is odder.

British libel law being what it is, the already wealthy Mr Williams has just received a large financial settlement and an apology. Good for him! Silly newspapers who should know better made untrue statements, and he took full advantage of the law to get compensation.

But there is something weird going on, nonetheless. Leave aside the peculiar way defamation puts the burden of proof on the defence. Here we have an example of the inflexibility of the common law. Why in early 21st century Britain it prima facie defamatory to impute homosexuality to a man (or, for that matter, un-chastity of any kind to a woman)?

This same week the British state directly affirmed (or seized control over, depending on your point of view) same-sex partnerships for the first time. And it is not just official recognition. Openly gay individuals are accepted and successful public figures. The most popular BBC drama series last year was the revival of Dr Who, mainstream family programming with a recurring supporting character who is a polymorphously perverse time-travelling conman, now liberated into his own series. The most imitated comedy turn in the nation’s playgrounds is Little Britain‘s Daffydd*, soi-disant “only gay in the village”, the joke of whom is his determination to be oppressed despite all the evidence around him that plenty of neighbours are un-dramatic queens, and nobody gives a toss anyway.

Likewise, who would give a toss if Robbie Williams had had homosexual dalliances? It wouldn’t make him a less entertaining performer or his music less catchy. It would not make him a less engaging personality. Arguably more complexity is more interesting in a public figure. So it is hard to see how the libellous story, however wrong or personally hurtful, could either lower him in the estimation of his peers or significantly damage his commercial prospects, which is the theoretical justification for libel damages.

On the other hand, I can be disparaging about the content of his musical work, or his stage act, and if I am widely published, then I might do real injury to his sale prospects, as well as emotional hurt to the creative person and performer. That’s not actionable, though. I am not saying it should be, but the comparison illuminates how archaic is libel.

[* I’m grateful for a commentator’s correction.]

Reading Perry’s story below reminded me of the word ‘canard’. In English, canard is a word often used to describe a hoax, or tall tale.

It comes from France, where the word also means duck. Now, it was a legend in my family that the reason this word came to mean a hoax was that there was a 19th century French farmer, who had twenty ducks. He killed one, and fed it to the other nineteen ducks, and then he killed another, and fed it to the surviving eighteen, and so on, until there was only one duck left, which had therefore eaten nineteen ducks. And that apparently, this tale was widely reported in the newspapers of the time, until it was revealed to be nonsense.

Hence, ‘canard’ entered the English language as a word meaning a hoax. Or so my grandfather told me.

Despite my best efforts, I have found no evidence of this story online. Perry’s jog of my memory causes me to ask the wide knowledge of the Samizdata readership this question- was my Grandfather telling me a ‘canard’ about the origin of the word?