There's not much the BBC website has to learn about building traffic.

Take for example the headline up today:

Great tits cope well with warming *

Inevitably, when one clicks through to the page, the story does not qualify for as much as a parental advisory sticker:

At least one of Britain's birds appears to be coping well as climate change alters the availability of a key food.

Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars.
Writing in the journal Science, they point out that the same birds in the Netherlands have not managed to adjust. Understanding why some species in some places are affected more than others by climatic shifts is vital, they say.

At this juncture, Malcolm wisely decides to avoid any comment about Dutch Birds, except to recall it is a fairly unremarkable pub, with a music room, up the Oldham Road in Failsworth, Manchester.

One can never be too careful with certain words in such a context, as for example:

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has banned the use of the word "cock" when applied to the male of the species, in case it causes offence.

An RSPB spokesman confirmed that it did not use the word 'cock' on its website
In a move condemned for "taking political correctness too far", a correspondent on an RSPB online forum was surprised to find that his use of the word "cock", when referring to a male blackbird, was replaced with four asterisks.

To which Malcolm can only add: "****!"

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.

As for Malcolm stooping so far
as to employ a provocative head-line
with a cheap word-play on "tits",
in the hope of attracting cheap trade,

perish the thought.

______________________________________________

* Curiously, after a while, the headline changed to:

Great tits in Britain seem to be adapting to global warming

Now, what happened there?

Sphere: Related Content