The mantle of the great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine

From The Clicking of Cuthbert by P.G. Wodehouse, 1922. In installments.

"It's true," he said, "I didn't finish in the first ten in the Open, and I was knocked out in the semi-final of the Amateur, but I won the French Open last year."

"The—what?"

"The French Open Championship. Golf, you know."

"Golf! You waste all your time playing golf. I admire a man who is more spiritual, more intellectual."

A pang of jealousy rent Cuthbert's bosom.

"Like What's-his-name Devine?" he said, sullenly.

"Mr. Devine," replied Adeline, blushing faintly, "is going to be a great man. Already he has achieved much. The critics say that he is more Russian than any other young English writer."

"And is that good?"

"Of course it's good."

"I should have thought the wheeze would be to be more English than any other young English writer."

"Nonsense! Who wants an English writer to be English? You've got to be Russian or Spanish or something to be a real success. The mantle of the great Russians has descended on Mr. Devine."

"From what I've heard of Russians, I should hate to have that happen to me."

"There is no danger of that," said Adeline scornfully.

"Oh! Well, let me tell you that there is a lot more in me than you think."

"That might easily be so."

"You think I'm not spiritual and intellectual," said Cuthbert, deeply moved. "Very well. Tomorrow I join the Literary Society."

Late October by David Graeme Baker

Late October by David Graeme Baker

Click to enlarge.

What is the cost of educational quality

From The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance by Eric A. Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, and Simon Wiederhold. An excellent topic area. From the Abstract:

International differences in teacher quality are commonly hypothesized to be a key determinant of the large international student performance gaps, but lack of consistent quality measures has precluded testing this. We construct country-level measures of teacher cognitive skills using unique assessment data for 31 countries. We find substantial differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries that are strongly related to student performance. Results are supported by fixed-effects estimation exploiting within-country between-subject variation in teacher skills. A series of robustness and placebo tests indicate a systematic influence of teacher skills as distinct from overall differences among countries in the level of cognitive skills. Moreover, observed country variations in teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to differences in women’s access to high-skill occupations outside teaching and to salary premiums for teachers.

Seems well structured and a good-faith effort to get at some important answers. It is handicapped, at a minimum, by its reliance on PISA data which has some well-noted issues.

But perhaps there is enough substance there to at least warrant some confirmation of general assumptions. The implications are interesting.

I have documented in the past that PISA scores are highly correlated with cultural groupings to the continental level at least, and sub-regional in locations such as Europe where there is sufficient data, and in the US where our ethnicity obsession allows a comparison of American PISA scores by cultural heritage (white Americans to Europe, Hispanics to Central and South America, Asian-Americans to Asia, etc.). The notable outcome of that analysis is that, while we bad-mouth our public education system, it delivers superior results when viewed from a cultural heritage perspective. White Americans perform better than all European countries other than Finland (and then only on the reading score), Asian-Americans better than any Asian country, etc. Yes, we have an inordinate number of issues with our public schools, but they are not as bad as is often made out to be.

There are almost innumerable material independent variables which affect educational outcome. A by no means exhaustive list:

Education policy
Centralization versus decentralization
Teacher training
Curriculum
Teacher quality (either years teaching and/or IQ)
Classroom management
Familial structure of students
Socioeconomic status
Per student spending
Class size
Age mixing
Gender mixing
National productivity
Career choices and compensation
Physical context of the school
Cultural valuation of education
Cultural, class, economic, ethnic, religious, etc. class heterogeneity
Relative starting point of children
Relative starting point of teachers
etc.

Disentangling which combination of all those variables has how much affect on which student populations under what circumstances is an enormous question which we have spent fifty years and more trying to understand with some progress but not near as much as we would wish. At this point, it is pretty clearly understood that 1) there are no silver bullets, and 2) one size does not fit all.

Hanushek, Piopiunik, and Wiederhold contribute some useful information.

With both approaches, we consistently find that differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries are strongly associated with international differences in student performance. In terms of magnitude, a one SD increase in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase in student performance of 0.10-0.15 SD. Since PISA scores represent the cumulative learning of 15-year-olds, this suggests an average learning gain of about 0.01-0.015 SD per year.

0.15 SD is about 15 IQ points. The implication is that if you lift your average teacher IQ from 100 to 115, you will raise you student performance from 100 to 101.5-102.3.

IQ is distributed on a Gaussian distribution. Only about a third of the population have an IQ above 115. Because it is Gaussian, the further along the curve you got (high and low, the disproportionately fewer there are). At two standard deviations above the mean, there are 3 people above and IQ of 130 (roughly).

Consequently, moving resources from the upper end of the distribution into schools will be tied with a reduction in supply for high cognitive jobs as well as a corresponding increase in cost, representing a loss of productivity.

If what Hanushek, Piopiunik, and Wiederhold have found is true, then the economic question becomes, "Is the loss of supply of 115 individuals for general economic activity more than made up for by increase of general population productivity associated with a move from population average IQ of 100 to 101.5-102.3. I don't know the answer. There are also, of course, all sorts of other ethical and you moral questions as well.

The economic question is hugely pertinent though, especially in a free market environment where individuals are able to make the personal choices that allow them to make decisions which optimize their well-being. If you are living in an agricultural country with low development and poor infrastructure and are out in the rural areas, a job as teacher, even if you are 1 SD above everyone else, might be worthwhile at an average wage because it keeps you close to home. If you are in a developed nation with a free market and are in the city with a 1 SD IQ, it might be the difference between an income of $65,000 as a teacher and $100,000 as a marketing manager. Who makes what choices is constrained by context of location, circumstance, economy, law, policy etc.

And also culture. Some places such as Japan and Finland keep teacher compensation low in return for significant cultural prestige. Te be a teacher is to be a cut above the average in social standing.

We are way too early in our understanding of the metrics, the causal dependencies and the supply elasticity.

My suspicion is that in advanced economies that are highly urbanized and where civil rights are well protected so that everyone has full access to all choices, the cost of pulling in +1 SD teachers will be very high and very apparent and the system return on that investment over a generation will be lower and later and less visible than will make such a shift in resources a compelling proposition at a national level. Local - quite possibly. Nationally - I wonder.

Scientific research which is neither.

I came across Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study by Lindsay Dodgson

The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analysed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behaviour.

It was launched in association with the London Press Club, and the objective was to determine how journalists can thrive under stress. It is not yet peer reviewed, and the sample size is small, so the results should not be taken necessarily as fact.

Each subject completed a blood test, wore a heart-rate monitor for three days, kept a food and drink diary for a week, and completed a brain profile questionnaire.

The results showed that journalists' brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.

Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.

A leadership coach as a researcher? Sponsored by the press? Of journalists? And reported on by journalists? OK, there's no reason for concern about research rigor and integrity.

And, indeed, the study itself (Study Into the Mental Resilience of Journalists by Dr Tara Swart) has all the hallmarks of cringe-making click bait. The self-promotion, the font sizes, the reliance on nominal credentials in place of institutional credibility, the self-help faddishness and sloganeering. Yikes. Cognitive pollution.

That doesn't even address that it is a non-random, self-selected, tiny sample size with no study controls or independence, cherry picking of data, etc.. What a dog's breakfast.

Apparently they wanted to find that journalists are highly-talented people in high-stress occupations, under continuous pressure. Nice romantic self-vision.

What they find is that these journalists are just like everyone else. Not especially stressed, subject to deadlines, a little better in some areas than the average professional and a little worse in others.

What caught my attention in a report otherwise intended to burnish the romantic notion of journalists as part of the intellectual elite were these items:

"High scores for abstraction indicate an ability to think outside of the box and make connections where others
might not see them." - Indeed, journalists do have a high score in abstract thinking, but it is about the same as with other professionals. In other words, journalists are as able to do abstract thinking as other professionals.

"High scores for value tagging indicate an ability to sift through information and pick out what is pertinent, as well
as high levels of meaning and purpose." - Same thing, journalists are as prone to cherry pick data as other professionals. The only issue that this represents is that the journalists and the general public have sharply different world views, especially in terms of ideological world view. What this measurement indicates is that journalists are as prone to confirmation bias as other professionals but it happens that journalists have a confirmation bias for a different worldview from that held by other professionals and the general public.

Out of eleven measures, there are only four where there are material differences between journalists and other professionals. In all other cases, there is only a two point or less difference between journalists and other professionals. The four attribute for which there is a more than two point difference are Abstraction where journalists are six points more abstract; Executive Function where professionals have an eight point advantage on executive function over journalists; Silencing the Mind where professionals have a seven point advantage, and Sensory Integration where professionals have a four point advantage.
These new agey categories are:

Abstraction: Abstraction is the capacity to make novel internal representations of the possible, a result of accurately grouping non-obvious patterns and their relationships. Abstraction draws upon knowledge (the building blocks of
innovation) and largely takes place in the dorsolateral pathways. These pathways are sometimes referred to as the
‘super highway’ en route to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, where the most sophisticated problem solving takes
place.

Executive Function: Executive function is assigned to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (outer top part of the frontal lobe). Regarded as the CEO of the brain, it is where the most sophisticated and enriched thinking takes place. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is interrelated with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (inner bottom part of the frontal lobe). Important aspects of executive function include working memory, focus and sustained attention.

Silencing the Mind: With Silencing the Mind we refer to purposeful sessions to enhance focus and/or to allow thoughts without reacting, thereby preventing worrying about the future or regretting the past (mindfulness)f you silence your mind for just 15 minutes daily it will positively affect the whole brain/body system. Among its many benefits, it promotes a relaxed physiological state at the level of the hypothalamus and amygdala and enhances the ability to focus and sustain attention at the level of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. It promotes brain cell formation in the hippocampus and reduces the sensitivity of the amygdala, calming it down and promoting clarity of mind

Sensory Integration: The brain always performs in the context of an external environment that continuously influences it. External cues are registered at the various primary sensory sites. From there the brain integrates the cues and attempts to make internal representations of what is out there and of what is possible. In this sense the external environment continuously affects innovation capability. In a special form of sensory integration known as priming, the amygdala and ventromedial pathways most likely play an important role.

So journalists are much better at making things up (Abstraction) than other professionals while they are significantly worse at self-control (Executive Function), thinking clearly (Silencing the Mind) and making sense of the world (Sensory Integration.)

In addition, journalists drink too much liquor, exercise too little, and hydrate too little.

In sum, the research supports that journalists function at a lower level and less reliably than other professionals and with significant barriers to understanding their world.

Pretty much what one might expect given the quality of reporting one sees.

But the reality is that the research does not support any of these conclusions. It is too badly designed to do so.

Unknown title by Sean Beavers

Unknown title by Sean Beavers

Click to enlarge.

I am a girl of ambition

From The Clicking of Cuthbert by P.G. Wodehouse, 1922. In installments.

I have dwelt upon this incident, because it was the means of introducing Cuthbert Banks to Mrs. Smethurst's niece, Adeline. As Cuthbert, for it was he who had so nearly reduced the muster-roll of rising novelists by one, hopped down from the table after his stroke, he was suddenly aware that a beautiful girl was looking at him intently. As a matter of fact, everyone in the room was looking at him intently, none more so than Raymond Parsloe Devine, but none of the others were beautiful girls. Long as the members of Wood Hills Literary Society were on brain, they were short on looks, and, to Cuthbert's excited eye, Adeline Smethurst stood out like a jewel in a pile of coke.

He had never seen her before, for she had only arrived at her aunt's house on the previous day, but he was perfectly certain that life, even when lived in the midst of gravel soil, main drainage, and company's own water, was going to be a pretty poor affair if he did not see her again. Yes, Cuthbert was in love: and it is interesting to record, as showing the effect of the tender emotion on a man's game, that twenty minutes after he had met Adeline he did the short eleventh in one, and as near as a toucher got a three on the four-hundred-yard twelfth.

I will skip lightly over the intermediate stages of Cuthbert's courtship and come to the moment when—at the annual ball in aid of the local Cottage Hospital, the only occasion during the year on which the lion, so to speak, lay down with the lamb, and the Golfers and the Cultured met on terms of easy comradeship, their differences temporarily laid aside—he proposed to Adeline and was badly stymied.

That fair, soulful girl could not see him with a spy-glass.

"Mr. Banks," she said, "I will speak frankly."

"Charge right ahead," assented Cuthbert.

"Deeply sensible as I am of——"

"I know. Of the honour and the compliment and all that. But, passing lightly over all that guff, what seems to be the trouble? I love you to distraction——"

"Love is not everything."

"You're wrong," said Cuthbert, earnestly. "You're right off it. Love——" And he was about to dilate on the theme when she interrupted him.

"I am a girl of ambition."

"And very nice, too," said Cuthbert.

"I am a girl of ambition," repeated Adeline, "and I realize that the fulfilment of my ambitions must come through my husband. I am very ordinary myself——"

"What!" cried Cuthbert. "You ordinary? Why, you are a pearl among women, the queen of your sex. You can't have been looking in a glass lately. You stand alone. Simply alone. You make the rest look like battered repaints."

"Well," said Adeline, softening a trifle, "I believe I am fairly good-looking——"

"Anybody who was content to call you fairly good-looking would describe the Taj Mahal as a pretty nifty tomb."

"But that is not the point. What I mean is, if I marry a nonentity I shall be a nonentity myself for ever. And I would sooner die than be a nonentity."

"And, if I follow your reasoning, you think that that lets me out?"

"Well, really, Mr. Banks, have you done anything, or are you likely ever to do anything worth while?"

Cuthbert hesitated.

Disentangling density, economic development, and education in terms of reduced fertility

From Population Density is a Key Factor in Declining Human Fertility by Wolfgang Lutz, Maria Rita Testa, and Dustin J. Penn. From the Abstract:

In studying the complex determinants of human fertility, social scientists have given little attention to population density, although reproduction has been shown to be density-dependent for a wide variety of other species. Using fixed effects models on the time series of 145 countries and controlling for key social and economic variables, we find a consistent and significant negative relationship between human fertility and population density. Moreover, we find that individual fertility preferences also decline with population density. These findings suggest that population density should be included as a variable in future studies of fertility determinants.

Urbanization increases density and cities are notorious consumers of people. In fact, I wonder if there are any major cities which have a positive native (i.e. non-immigrant and non-local migration from suburbs or country) population growth. None that I can think of.

We have been urbanizing rapidly and passed the 50% mark for urbanization about ten years ago, i.e. more than fifty percent of the worlds population now lives in cities.

Economists have long been aware of the association between economic development in general and universal education in particular as factors which drive down human fertility. Obviously economic development overlaps as a factor with densification. I wonder what the relative causal weight can be attributed to density over development and education. I am guessing it might be fairly significant.

Up and At 'em by Gerald Leake

Up and At 'em by Gerald Leake

Click to enlarge.

Crash Blossoms

From Crash Blossoms by Ben Zimmer in 2010.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning once gave the poetry of her husband, Robert, a harsh assessment, criticizing his habit of excessively paring down his syntax with opaque results. “You sometimes make a dust, a dark dust,” she wrote him, “by sweeping away your little words.”

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

For years, there was no good name for these double-take headlines. Last August, however, one emerged in the Testy Copy Editors online discussion forum. Mike O’Connell, an American editor based in Sapporo, Japan, spotted the headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” and wondered, “What’s a crash blossom?” (The article, from the newspaper Japan Today, described the successful musical career of Diana Yukawa, whose father died in a 1985 Japan Airlines plane crash.) Another participant in the forum, Dan Bloom, suggested that “crash blossoms” could be used as a label for such infelicitous headlines that encourage alternate readings, and news of the neologism quickly spread.

After I mentioned the coinage of “crash blossoms” on the linguistics blog Language Log, having been alerted to it by the veteran Baltimore Sun copy editor John E. McIntyre, new examples came flooding in. Linguists love this sort of thing, because the perils of ambiguity can reveal the limits of our ability to parse sentences correctly. Syntacticians often refer to the garden-path phenomenon, wherein a reader is led down one interpretive route before having to double back to the beginning of the sentence to get on the right track.

Crash Blossoms - love it.

Lawrences Durrell in Antrobus Complete has numerous examples from his time as a journalist at a local English-language newspaper in post-WWII Belgrade where the printers/compositors were non-English speaking. The consequence was Crash Blossoms galore. Well, really, they are mostly typos and only a few crash blossoms, but they are of a similar linguistic ilk.

From the chapter, Frying the Flag, page page 33 to 37 in Antrobus Complete.

'And yet time softens so many things. I confess I look back on the old Central Balkan Herald with something like nostalgia.'

'Good heavens,' said Antrobus, and blew out his cheeks. We were enjoying a stirrup-cup at his club before taking a turn in the park. Our conversation, turning as it always did upon our common experiences abroad in the Foreign Service, had led us with a sort of ghastly inevitability to the sisters Grope; Bessie and Enid Grope, joint editor-proprietors of the Central Balkan Herald (circulation 500). They had spent all their lives in Serbia, for their father had once been Embassy chaplain and on retirement had elected to settle in the dusty Serbian plains. Where, however, they had inherited the old flat-bed press and the stock of battered Victorian faces, I cannot tell, but the fact remains that they had produced between them an extraordinary daily newspaper which remains without parallel in my mind after a comparison with newspapers in more than a dozen countries — 'THE BALKAN HERALD KEEPS THE BRITISH FLAG FRYING' - that was the headline that greeted me on the morning of my first appearance in the Press Department. It was typical.

The reason for a marked disposition towards misprints was not far to seek; the composition room, where the paper was hand-set daily, was staffed by half a dozen hirsute Serbian peasants with greasy elf-locks and hands like shovels. Bowed and drooling and uttering weird eldritch-cries from time to time they went up and down the type-boxes with the air of half-emancipated baboons hunting for fleas. The master printer was called Icic (pronounced Itchitch) and he sat forlornly in one corner living up to his name by scratching himself from time to time. Owing to such laborious methods of composition the editors were hardly ever able to call for extra proofs; even as it was the struggle to get the paper out on the streets was grandiose to watch. Some time in the early thirties it had come out a day late and that day had never been made up. With admirable single-mindedness the sisters decided, so as not to leave gaps in their files, to keep the date twenty-four hours behind reality until such times as, by a superhuman effort, they could produce two newspapers in one day and thus catch up.

Bessie and Enid Grope sat in the editorial room which was known as the 'den'. They were both tabby in colouring and wore rusty black. They sat facing one another pecking at two ancient typewriters which looked as if they had been obtained from the Science Museum or the Victoria and Albert.

Bessie was News, Leaders, and Gossip; Enid was Features, Make-up and general Sub. Whenever they were at a loss for copy they would mercilessly pillage ancient copies of Punch or Home Chat. An occasional hole in the copy was filled with a ghoulish smudge - local blockmaking clearly indicated that somewhere a poker-work fanatic had gone quietly out of his mind. In this way the Central Balkan Herald was made up every morning and then delivered to the composition room where the chaingang rapidly reduced it to gibberish. MINISTER FINED FOR KISSING IN PUBIC. WEDDING BULLS RING OUT FOR PRINCESS. QUEEN OF HOLLAND GIVES PANTY FOR EX-SERVICE MEN. MORE DOGS HAVE BABIES THIS SUMMER IN BELGRADE. BRITAINS NEW FLYING-GOAT.

In the thirties this did not matter so much but with the war and the growth of interest in propaganda both the Foreign Office and the British Council felt that an English newspaper was worth keeping alive in the Balkans if only to keep the flag flying. A modest subsidy and a free news service went a long way to help the sisters, though of course there was nothing to be done with the crew down in the composition room. 'Mrs Schwartkopf has cast off clothes of every description and invites inspection.' 'In a last desperate spurt the Cambridge crew, urged on by their pox, overtook Oxford.'

Every morning I could hear the whistles and groans and sighs as each of the secretaries unfolded his copy and addressed himself to his morning torture. On the floor above, Polk-Mowbray kept drawing his breath sharply at every misprint like someone who has run a splinter into his finger. At this time the editorial staff was increased by the addition of Mr Tope, an elderly catarrhal man who made up the news page, thus leaving Bessie free to follow her bent in paragraphs on gardening ('How to Plant Wild Bubs') and other extravagances. It was understood that at some time in the remotest past Mr Tope had been in love with Bessie but he 'had never Spoken'; perhaps he had fallen in love with both sisters simultaneously and had been unable to decide which to marry. At all events he sat in the 'den' busy with the world news; every morning he called on me for advice. 'We want the Herald to play its full part in the war effort,' he never failed to assure me gravely. 'We are all in this together.' There was little I could do for him.

At times I could not help feeling that the Herald was more trouble than it was worth. References, for example, to 'Hitler's nauseating inversion — the rocket-bomb' brought an immediate visit of protest from Herr Schpunk, the German chargé, dictionary in hand, while the early stages of the war were greeted with BRITAIN DROPS BIGGEST EVER BOOB ON BERLIN. This caused mild speculation as to whom this personage might be. Attempts, moreover, to provide serious and authoritative articles for the Herald written by members of the Embassy shared the same fate. Spalding, the commercial attaché who was trying to negotiate on behalf of the British Mining Industry, wrote a painstaking survey of the wood resources of Serbia which appeared under the startling banner BRITAIN TO BUY SERBIAN TIT-PROPS, while the military attaché who was rash enough to contribute a short strategic survey of Suez found that the phrase 'Canal Zone' was printed without a 'C' throughout. There was nothing one could do. 'One feels so desperately ashamed,' said Polk-Mowbray, 'with all the resources of culture and so on that we have - that a British newspaper abroad should put out such disgusting gibberish. After all, it's semi-official, the Council has subsidized it specially to spread the British Way of Life. . . . It's not good enough.'

But there was nothing much we could do. The Herald lurched from one extravagance to the next. Finally in the columns of Theatre Gossip there occurred a series of what Antrobus called Utter Disasters. The reader may be left to imagine what the Serbian compositors would be capable of doing to a witty urbane and deeply considered review of the 100,000th performance of Charley's Aunt.

The Herald expired with the invasion of Yugoslavia and the sisters were evacuated to Egypt where they performed prodigies of valour in nursing refugees. With the return to Belgrade, however, they found a suspicious Communist regime in power which ignored all their requests for permission to refloat the Herald. They brought their sorrows to the Embassy, where Polk-Mowbray received them with a stagey but absent-minded sympathy. He agreed to plead with Tito, but of course he never did. 'If they start that paper up again,' he told his Chancery darkly, 'I shall resign.' 'They'd make a laughing stork out of you, sir,' said Spalding. (The pre-war mission had been returned almost unchanged.)

Mr Tope also returned and to everyone's surprise had Spoken and had been accepted by Bessie; he was now comparatively affluent and was holding the post which in the old days used to be known as Neuter's Correspondent - aptly or not who can say?

'Well, I think the issue was very well compounded by getting the old girls an MBE each for distinguished services to the British Way of Life. I'll never forget the investiture with Bessie and Enid in tears and Mr Tope swallowing like a toad. And all the headlines Spalding wrote for some future issue of the Herald: "Sister Roasted in Punk Champagne after solemn investitute".'

'It's all very well to laugh,' said Antrobus severely, 'but a whole generation of Serbs have had their English gouged and mauled by the Herald. Believe me, old man, only yesterday I had a letter from young Babic, you remember him?'

'Of course.'

'For him England is peppered with fantastic place names which he can only have got from the Herald. He says he enjoyed visiting Henleg Regatta and Wetminster Abbey; furthermore, he was present at the drooping of the colour; he further adds that the noise of Big Bun striking filled him with emotion; and that he saw a film about Florence Nightingale called "The Lade With the Lump". No, no, old man, say what you will the Herald has much to answer for. It is due to sinister influences like the Gropes and Topes of this world that the British Council's struggle is such an uphill one. Care for another?'

The afternoon's session had to be classed as a complete frost

From The Clicking of Cuthbert by P.G. Wodehouse, 1922. In installments.

It was in the picturesque little settlement of Wood Hills (said the Oldest Member) that the incidents occurred which I am about to relate. Even if you have never been in Wood Hills, that suburban paradise is probably familiar to you by name. Situated at a convenient distance from the city, it combines in a notable manner the advantages of town life with the pleasant surroundings and healthful air of the country. Its inhabitants live in commodious houses, standing in their own grounds, and enjoy so many luxuries—such as gravel soil, main drainage, electric light, telephone, baths (h. and c.), and company's own water, that you might be pardoned for imagining life to be so ideal for them that no possible improvement could be added to their lot. Mrs. Willoughby Smethurst was under no such delusion. What Wood Hills needed to make it perfect, she realized, was Culture. Material comforts are all very well, but, if the summum bonum is to be achieved, the Soul also demands a look in, and it was Mrs. Smethurst's unfaltering resolve that never while she had her strength should the Soul be handed the loser's end. It was her intention to make Wood Hills a centre of all that was most cultivated and refined, and, golly! how she had succeeded. Under her presidency the Wood Hills Literary and Debating Society had tripled its membership.

But there is always a fly in the ointment, a caterpillar in the salad. The local golf club, an institution to which Mrs. Smethurst strongly objected, had also tripled its membership; and the division of the community into two rival camps, the Golfers and the Cultured, had become more marked than ever. This division, always acute, had attained now to the dimensions of a Schism. The rival sects treated one another with a cold hostility.

Unfortunate episodes came to widen the breach. Mrs. Smethurst's house adjoined the links, standing to the right of the fourth tee: and, as the Literary Society was in the habit of entertaining visiting lecturers, many a golfer had foozled his drive owing to sudden loud outbursts of applause coinciding with his down-swing. And not long before this story opens a sliced ball, whizzing in at the open window, had come within an ace of incapacitating Raymond Parsloe Devine, the rising young novelist (who rose at that moment a clear foot and a half) from any further exercise of his art. Two inches, indeed, to the right and Raymond must inevitably have handed in his dinner-pail.

To make matters worse, a ring at the front-door bell followed almost immediately, and the maid ushered in a young man of pleasing appearance in a sweater and baggy knickerbockers who apologetically but firmly insisted on playing his ball where it lay, and, what with the shock of the lecturer's narrow escape and the spectacle of the intruder standing on the table and working away with a niblick, the afternoon's session had to be classed as a complete frost. Mr. Devine's determination, from which no argument could swerve him, to deliver the rest of his lecture in the coal-cellar gave the meeting a jolt from which it never recovered.