A few things I’ve been thinking about this week. The forty-eighth post of a series.

Having enjoyed the Channel 5 version twenty years ago, I decided to watch the Netflix take on the international game show format The Mole this week. I felt it lost something in the slickness of the production.

There was a baffling decision to include an obviously staged shot partway through the series, which all but confirmed the identity of the mole. I assumed this was being included solely to be back-referenced in the finale—the Channel 5 version had a whole ‘how did viewers miss that clue?!’ episode. But it wasn’t mentioned, so I’ve no idea why they included such a blatant spoiler.

I’d still watch another series, though.

It’s a while since I ranted about “whilst”. This week, I’m being involuntarily irked by people writing “utilise” when they mean “use”. Many would say that this is grammatically fine, but it nevertheless gives a similar sense of someone trying to complicate their language for effect, which is almost always a mistake in expository writing. Why obfuscate? What have you got to hide?

I’d also like to propose a ban on the phrase “just some of the”—as in “just some of the things in this issue” or “just some of the photographs from this event”. The “just” and “of the” are both unnecessary, their rhetorical function outweighed by the irritation caused by this phraseology being insufferably twee.

Public health bodies need stability and institutional memory. Their recent history in the UK shows little of either. UKHSA became fully operational in October 2021 as part of reforms to replace Public Health England (PHE). The government had introduced it under a different name, then spent £560,000 on consultants to provide it with a ‘vision and purpose’ – suggesting to some observers that ‘policy makers did not have a clear plan in mind’.

Indeed.

The images in this post are all AI-generated images for the prompt ‘The word “utilise” crossed out on a piece of paper’ created by OpenAI’s DALL-E 2. Every so often, the results are surprisingly inaccurate.