Yeah - I understand your feelings. Especially when we are about to go to war against an abstract noun ... 'Terror'.

Darren reminded me last night that Mussolini kept morale up by constantly declaring war on nouns. Perchance the Bush people are students of the Italian dictator?

In this climate, sensitivity to the slipperiness of words is a good thing!

Hmm, funny that you should write that. I always felt you had a way with words.

Oh yeah - come to the Buzzcocks. Think it's Shelley & Diggle with a ringer rhythm section. ;)

I have a strange relationship with words. On the one hand, I pretty much make my living out of writing. I research, I analyse, but most of all I write. A surprisingly large amount of my time is spent redrafting reports and documents for style. It's one of the perils of working in political organisations: certain words acquire the ability to express entire political outlooks, and become too highly loaded to use in argument. As an example, I am not having any "problems" at the moment, and there is no way I'm recommending any "push-button" technologies.

On the other hand, I suffer a negative definition of writerly inability. I cannot write what I want. Blank screens are still blank pages; the words might be there but not the stories, or not the thread that makes even simple words stick together. I've always admired very simple songs for this reason, for their ability to make a few words tell a story where a paragraph doesn't.