Word Processing


What words should I teach? What words do students actually need to know? I don't know either, and intuition is always a lousy guide, but here's one approach to finding out.

The latest Oxford English Dictionary contains about 290,500 entries. The Concise OED has 65795, and I'm using these as my starting point.

I can discard 13,479 entries because they're phrases instead of individual words, plus I can lose 2,727 entries because they're hyphenated terms. That leaves 45,495.

But which ones are absolutely essential, which are kind-of useful, and which are in there to make it look 'comprehensive' or because the compilers just liked them?

I have the subtitles of 20,749 BBC programmes broadcast over the last two years - in effect, transcriptions. By ditching the shortest 749, then filtering out formatting data and punctuation, I've got a pretty large corpus of reasonably authentic utterances.

So, what words from the COED occur with what frequency in the BBC transcriptions? And what words don't occur at all?

Well, here a selection from the 14,633 individual words which occur exactly zero times in two years worth of BBC TV. I know what ten of them mean.

WordOccurances
backgrounder0
bouclé0
chametz0
contumacious0
delist0
dyspepsia0
externalism0
gambado0
headquarter0
inamorato0
kaffeeklatsch0
linstock0
menhir0
mutuel0
orangeman0
pemphigoid0
portière0
raja0
sandinista0
siksika0
stumer0
tetrastich0
tynwald0
usufruct0
yaar0

That means 29,140 words occur at least once. Here are 25 of the 19,381 which occur less than ten times. I know the meanings of 14 of them - what about you?

WordOccurances
shirty9
maraschino8
cortisone7
serried7
ganglion6
turbocharger6
gilet5
som5
convulsion4
nimbus4
unlistenable4
divestment3
miscast3
spousal3
bioactive2
epsilon2
leafhopper2
prelate2
tambourin2
angiography1
chinkara1
eclampsia1
honeyguide1
minuteman1
piscina1

9,339 occur a hundred times or more. The following happen more than ten but less than 1,000 times.

WordOccurances
honourable704
underwear529
vain416
troop327
muffin264
max215
cam177
blip150
uncanny129
gland111
aerospace96
detonate83
mangle72
yam63
ringside55
chamomile47
embryonic41
poncho36
uneducated32
bawl27
gunfight24
permissible21
convection18
lucre16
morass14

A more managable quantity of 520 occur 10,000 or more times. Here are some of those between 1000 and 10,000:

WordOccurances
summer8831
offer7861
including6985
hopefully6285
fruit5693
showing5224
closed4761
sight4342
location4031
countryside3784
product3474
lack3211
arrive3001
transport2793
shower2633
iron2484
breathe2297
panic2162
twist2031
cave1921
purple1824
innocent1718
fraud1641
virtually1560
assume1480


Here's a selection between 10,000 and 100,000. Do any surprise you as being more or less common than you thought?

WordOccurances
get273618
much117311
home63526
course45194
lovely34349
such28509
front24414
while20752
easy18113
hold16047
dad13846
hour12535
cost11389
beat10660

A mere 76 occur 100,000 or more times:

WordOccurances
the3812984
to2404952
a2098428
of1699308
and1640805
it1432806
in1209482
that1173021
for730257
on699870
have633194
this568081
be564405
are532264
with490772
not401645
at396377
he374352
do368329
me350617
all346828
what338545
there337154
as331112
but321033
like319404
just309660
up305068
can297541
about290147
out285530
so285324
going283807
think281064
from275761
get273618
will269378
know267222
here252640
go239097
an220785
very212718
them212592
see201120
time196690
now187122
if187114
right182193
by182007
more179865
really176809
good169427
people168640
or163126
back160195
some159211
she157138
want152556
no148444
then137351
into134491
down130689
how130228
look124413
come124007
way123631
make122129
over119391
well117864
say117728
much117311
need115195
bit113799
off107582
little103122
take101002

So, here's one difficulty in learning a language. Once you've got the major meanings of the top 100-200 words, you've got tens of thousands of others to learn, and the additional benefit of knowing each of them - their usefulness - is pretty damn small.

How often do you need to describe something as 'spicy' (position 3,000, 975 occurances)? Or 'compulsory' (position 5,000, 370 occurances)? Or describe someone as a 'colonel' (position 7,000, 182 occurances)?

I may have had the occasional 'manky' cheese sandwich (position 10,000, 85 occurances) - but I'm not sure I've ever used the word in conversation.

The Arabic method of learning languages is "memorise the dictionary". It doesn't work, for obvious reasons. But it's...interesting that they've taken only the most difficult, least interesting and least rewarding part of the process, missing out all the easy, fun and useful parts.

The Arabs are almost British in their ability to miss the point.

Algebra of Need


This is a bit of a rant. Sorry.

There are three reasons to stay in a job, or a place, or an arrangement. One is for the money, or some other definite, measurable and significant benefit.

Two is because you enjoy it.

And three, the job itself isn't what you love or benefit from, but it comes bundled with something that does give you something good. You might not like the city, but you stay because your family are there. A personal reason.

Well, my personal reason to stay in this job, this city and this country...is incredibly busy and a two hour plane journey away. I am thoroughly bored with teaching - maybe after a good holiday I'll start to like it again, but right now I get no pleasure from stepping into the classroom.

And the money...is always promised, and in the future. The one big contract which will make us all rich is always on the horizon, and negotiations are in progress, but it never arrives.

So, of the three possible reasons to stay, I don't have one.

And I do have reasons to leave. I am sick of so many things about this country. I'm sick of the insane bureaucracy that means it takes a year to get a licence to set up a business, and six months to get a bank account, and three months to get a work permit - which ties you to one contract with one employer for twelve months.

The only way to get out of a contract is to commit a crime and get deported. And if it comes to that, the easiest crime to commit is to go on strike.

I'm sick of the infantile supersition that's tied up with self-mythologisation. The more intelligent Arabs I've met are puzzled that god's chosen people are not rulers of the world - and the stupider ones can't grasp that outsiders don't want to be god's chosen people.

In this last, they're a bit like the stupider Americans.

Why did god deliver his message in Arabic? Was it because he was talking to an arab? No, it's because arabic is god's language. And how do we know this? Obviously, it's because he delivered his message in arabic.

Oh, and because arabic allegedly (but not really) has sounds that no other language has. Because...something or other. And therefore...something. Somehow.

We know the Quran is the perfect, eternal word of the magic man in the sky because it's impossible for mere mortals to make a sentence which compares in beauty to any of its sentences. And we know this because the people who've appointed themselves to judge the beauty of competing sentences have already decided that no sentence can compare.

I'm sick of a government that's trying to reap the benefits of being open, while staying closed. They want to be innovative and cosmopolitan while staying a fossilised monoculture. The people are obsessed with images of drugs, alcohol, sexual freedom and even political dissent...and with condemning each other for having the same thoughts.

This is a culture that's trying to develop a work ethic while maintaining a racist elitism that justify's only foreigners doing work. And not just foreigners from poor countries.

I'm sick of an educational system that confuses rote recitation and mindless copying with learning. Tomorrow I'm invigilating an exam for elementary students who, after six years of study, can name every object in their house. They just can't construct a single complete sentence about them.

They've actually asked for more tests and exams, presumably on the grounds that the more tests you do, the more chance you'll get the answers right by the law of averages.

Oh, and strictly unofficially, no one gets graded below 50%, even if all they do is write their misspelled name at the top of the sheet. Because low grades are "discouraging" and high ones are "respectful".

So what's the plan?

Well, there is another potential big contract that will take four weeks for come into effect...or else collapse. In fact it's the biggest ever. So if after six weeks the money is rolling in, I can stay until the work permit expires in February.

If it isn't, I'm out. And with luck I'll even be home for christmas.


Edit: Actually, a slight miscalculation. The work permit doesn't expire in the second month of the Gregorian calendar, it expires in the second month of the Islamic calendar - which is used in one islamic country, and almost exclusively on official documents. Like, erm, work permits.

Expiration date: The 27th of Safar. Also known as the 30th of December. New Year's Eve.

So I've got ten weeks.

Need to Know

Sometimes you don't know whether something's worth doing 'til you've already done it.

In teaching (or learning) a language, it's always a puzzle which words you should tackle first, and which can wait for later. English has around 200 prepositions, of which half are so rare and specialised you can avoid them altogether unless you work in the relavent field. Here are the bottom ten prepositions in a frequency-ordered list I did:

astride
afore
apropos
neath
athwart
agin
modulo
anent
frae
aslant

I don't even know what 'agin' and 'frae' mean, and I'm pretty sure the only one I've used in the last decade is 'modulo'.

But simple frequency might not be always the best guide. So I thought, what about the number of senses? Excluding words with more 'structural' meanings, like conjunctions and pronouns, isn't it true that the most useful words are also those with the most uses?

Which would mean, if I can come up with an automatable procedure to transcribe a software dictionary, count the number of 'meanings' that each entry has, and order them by how many meanings each word has...I can get a guide to the most useful words for students to know.

So I did it. And then I did it again because the data was corrupted. And then I did it again because the processing wasn't quite right.

And now I have a list of 450 nouns, all with ten or more dictionary senses - though not generally ten noun senses, because they're also adjectives, verbs etc.

Column 1 is the word, 2 is the number of senses, then 3, 4 and 5 are whether the words has senses as noun, verb and adjective respectively.

WordSensesNounVerbAdj
blood21NV
fair20NVA
tongue20NV
bit19N
cold19NA
green19NVA
heel19NV
rise19NV
snap19NVA
bang18NV
bone18NV
death18N
life18N
name18NVA
wear18NV
wipe18NV
card17NV
care17NV
course17NV
cousin17N
job17NV
over17N
peg17NV
quarter17NV
radical17NA
shell17NV
shift17NV
slack17NVA
warm17NVA
wind17NV
act16NV
bed16NV
blank16NVA
control16NV
face16NV
fill16NV
horn16NV
question16NV
seed16NV
view16NV
arm15N
board15NV
bottom15NVA
common15NA
force15NV
forward15NVA
grain15NV
kiss15NV
mount15NV
rail15NV
range15NV
reverse15NVA
rule15NV
shade15NV
shape15NV
sick15NVA
silver15NV
stack15NV
state15NV
storm15NV
think15NV
waste15NVA
wheel15NV
wrap15NV
ball14NV
belt14NV
bend14NV
blast14NV
bomb14NV
boot14NV
bright14NA
by14N
chip14NV
corner14NV
deal14NV
edge14NV
fat14NVA
flame14NV
flesh14NV
flight14NV
God14N
issue14NV
last14NA
late14NA
no14N
past14NA
perfect14NVA
reach14NV
repeat14NV
reserve14NV
ring14NV
ship14NV
smart14NVA
speed14NV
steam14NV
stiff14NVA
sweat14NV
sweep14NV
tap14NV
trail14NV
transfer14NV
wall14NV
beam13NV
breath13N
brief13NVA
button13NV
cloud13NV
credit13NV
doubt13NV
fault13NV
fish13NV
grass13NV
grip13NV
handle13NV
hole13NV
kind13N
laugh13NV
liberal13NA
love13NV
map13NV
mess13NV
nail13NV
natural13NA
note13NV
nut13NV
offer13NV
pan13NV
pay13NV
pin13NV
plug13NV
position13NV
record13NV
register13NV
report13NV
resolve13NV
rock13N
saddle13NV
save13NV
seal113NV
shadow13NV
shoe13NV
small13NA
spare13NVA
spill113NV
stay13NV
stem13NV
subject13NVA
suit13NV
trace113NV
trip13NV
weight13NV
whistle13NV
wide13NA
wire13NV
wonder13NV
world13N
balloon12NV
brush12NV
chance12NV
clip12NV
close12NV
crown12NV
deep12NA
dust12NV
earth12NV
fear12NV
fiddle12NV
float12NV
grant12NV
guard12NV
gun12NV
gut12NV
hair12N
hammer12NV
hog12NV
ice12NV
inside12NA
interest12NV
length12N
liberty12N
lick12NV
lip12NV
load12NV
low112NA
ordinary12NA
paint12NV
picture12NV
plot12NV
positive12NA
puff12NV
rally12NV
rap12NV
rib12NV
road12N
rush12NV
sack12NV
say12NV
section12NV
serve12NV
sock12NV
spit12NV
spout12NV
spread12NV
star12NV
sting12NV
stone12NV
stump12NV
style12NV
sun12NV
sweet12NA
tooth12N
tread12NV
tube12NV
warrant12NV
yellow12NVA
abstract11NVA
acid11NA
associate11NVA
bank11NV
bell11NV
best11NVA
bind11NV
bird11N
bond11NV
clerk11NV
clock11NV
cock11NV
colour11NV
crush11NV
cry11NV
dance11NV
dig11NV
dish11NV
drink11NV
drum11NV
ear11N
flow11NV
flutter11NV
fold11NV
gas11NV
grade11NV
grind11NV
hack11NV
hop11NV
index11NV
joint11NVA
leaf11NV
loose11NVA
major11NVA
mantle11NV
market11NV
meet11NV
model11NV
mother11NV
motion11NV
needle11NV
neutral11NA
nod11NV
offset11NV
pad11NV
period11NA
profile11NV
programme11NV
quick11NA
rate111NV
rattle11NV
ray11NV
reason11NV
recall11NV
relative11NA
release11NV
ring11NV
riot11NV
rod11N
savage11NVA
secular11NA
service11NV
sleep11NV
slick11NVA
soak11NV
solid11NA
sort11NV
sound11NV
sponge11NV
spur11NV
stamp11NV
standing11NA
store11NV
surprise11NV
terminal11NA
tool11NV
tramp11NV
traverse11NV
treat11NV
tumble11NV
tune11NV
upset11NVA
value11NV
voice11NV
wolf11NV
woman11N
worm11NV
worse11NA
wrong11NVA
ace10NVA
address10NV
advance10NVA
answer10NV
appeal10NV
band10NV
bead10NV
bill110NV
body10NV
bridge10NV
broad10NA
brown10NVA
bulk10NV
bundle10NV
business10N
cat10NV
charm10NV
chill10NVA
climb10NV
conjugate10NVA
cool10NVA
crib10NV
crisp10NVA
crop10NV
cup10NV
dash10NV
dip10NV
distress10NV
doctor10NV
dope10NVA
dream10NV
dress10NV
drift10NV
due10NA
early10NA
escape10NV
evolution10N
fancy10NVA
father10NV
favour10NV
feather10NV
feel10NV
fence10NV
fetch10NV
flag110NV
flare10NV
fur10NV
glass10NV
Gothic10NA
great10NA
gripe10NV
groove10NV
gross10NVA
hat10N
heaven10N
horse10NV
hump10NV
if10N
indent10NV
iron10NV
jam10NV
juice10NV
king10NV
label10NV
lash10NV
left10NA
lustre110N
marshal10NV
mask10NV
mask10NV
match10NV
medium10NA
mill10NV
minor10NVA
monkey10NV
mould10NV
murder10NV
mute10NVA
native10NA
nature10N
net10NV
objective10NA
oblique10NA
occult10NVA
pace10NV
package10NV
palm10NV
phase10NV
physical10NA
powder10NV
prime10NA
project10NV
race10NV
rake10NV
ram10NV
ramp10NV
regard10NV
rope10NV
safe10NA
sail10NV
scrape10NV
sense10NV
shaft10NV
shock10NV
shoulder10NV
shout10NV
sin10NV
sing10NV
size110NV
skew10NVA
skid10NV
sling10NV
snow10NV
sour10NVA
space10NV
spike10NV
spirit10NV
stagger10NV
stall10NV
steady10NVA
steal10NV
stitch10NV
straw10N
streak10NV
stream10NV
street10N
surface10NVA
swell10NVA
tear10NV
thing10N
thread10NV
tick10NV
ticket10NV
toe10NV
ton10N
tough10NA
town10N
type10NV
vein10N
void10NVA
ward10NV
warp10NV
weather10NV
welcome10NVA
will10NV
window10N

I don't know whether I can do anything with this, and similar tables, after two weeks work. But if you're not prepared to invent something useless, you can't be an inventor.

The American Way (Part 2)

One definition of stupidity is trying the same tactic in the same situation, over and over again, in the hope that this time the result will be different.

Examples include:
  • Students trying to flatter their teacher into giving them a discount on their fee, especially when it's not the teacher who decides the fee
  • Teachers using the same crappy textbook that uses obscure technical terminology to explain simple ideas
  • Schools employing Urdu-speakers with basic English to teach Arabic-speakers with even less
Another definition is trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

Examples:
  • Teachers measuring student english level as a percentage of an imaginary "total fluency"
  • Doing it with an exam, yielding the very precise and totally meaningless estimate that Student X has 68.3% of perfection.
  • Doing the same for teachers with 'assessments'. Apparently teachers can assess students, students can assess teachers, and managers can assess teachers, but the only people wise enough to assess managers are other managers.
A third is: Thinking you can make reality your personal bitch the same way you try with people. Using bullshit, bribes and promises.

And when that doesn't work, shouting, bullying, threatening, intimidation...and writing memos.

And when that doesn't work, insisting that you've won already, hoping the universe will be tired enough to not contradict you. Animism and anthropomorphism are probably the oldest superstitions on the planet, and the hardest to kill.

So, I have now had four days of working for this insane company, which is odd, as there's only been work for two of them.

Interlink has grudgingly accepted that students don't come into lessons on non-American national holidays. But it has yet to grasp that they don't come in on days leading up to, or following from, national holidays.

Hence orders from head office that I and my colleagues sit in our classrooms for six hours a day, even when there are exactly zero students.

We can't mark them as 'Absent', because if we did, we'd have to expel them for multiple absenses because the Big Book Of Stupidly Inflexible Rules says we have to. So we mark them as 'Late'. Specifically, that they will be two weeks late, when (if) they return after the holidays.

So why can't we just lie and mark them as 'Present'? That is, after all, the tradition in this country. Yes, it really is. Officially, a class cannot be empty, so if it is empty, it's officially full. Why can't we adopt the local custom and do this?

The answer is that in book-keeping, spoken lies don't count, but written ones do. Lying on a school register is Document Fraud(TM), which is Very Bad(TM). Plus, if anyone is registered as 'Present', there must also be a record of What They Were Taught. And of Whether They Learned It. And if they didn't, Why Not? Non-existence is not considered a valid excuse.

In bureaucracy, as in sitcoms, lies lead to more lies.

So, I have been sitting in my classroom, catching up on podcasts, reading and working out abstruse bits of grammar. My colleagues have been doing all the pointless paperwork for the job, which the job didn't give them time for before. And our manager has been very busy, co-ordinating the inactivity by skype with other managers.

And his manager gets to spend extra hours in bed, so we don't have to deal with his confident self-belief.

So lets hear it for stupidity. If you're a bit clever and a bit lucky, you can get things done while the idiots are trying to define how to get things done.

The American Way

Ambrose Bierce defined a career as the first day of a new job.

If so, I hated everything about my career today.

Bad managers like to make rules, because they think managing means changing things, and they think the more managing you do, the more effective you are as a manager.

A good manager realises that if you have to change things all the time, it's probably because your last set of changes buggered everything up. And if you don't have to make changes, you don't.

An actually effective manager has nothing to do - except block the imbicilities of the bad managers - and does exactly that, letting the people who do the actual work, do the actual work.

Guess which kind runs the Interlink corporation? And yes, it is an American company.

Here's an example of how it works:
Problem: Students don't come to lectures.

Solution: Initiate a complicated registering system whereby a student who arrives less than ten minutes late is marked 'Present', while one who is between ten and thirty minutes late is marked 'Late', and one over thirty minutes late - or actually absent - is marked 'Absent'. Any student who is 'Late' more than three times gets an additional 'Absent' mark, and anyone with thirty 'Absent' marks is expelled.

This is supposed, somehow, to encourage lazy students to attend. Not so they can learn, but so they can continue to pay for the tuition they're not using.

Exactly how threating to stop charging should keep customers paying, I'm not sure.

Solution to the Solution: Students come to lectures on time, then after the register is called, develop an urgent and possibly plausible reason to be somewhere else.

Solution to the Solution of the Solution: Teachers call the register at the end of the session.

Problem: Management decree that all registers must be completed and submitted in thirty minutes after the lesson starts, neatly making the whole process even more pointless than it was.
Also, my work clothes are deemed not formal enough. This from the school which expels students if they wear jeans or don't wear a white shirt. It does this officially but not really, because if it did it would expel half the students, and lose the income from their fees.

And every student must add no less than three pages of written work to both of their colour-coded folders every week. And I have to explain grammatical concepts without using grammatical terms. And I have to teach only speaking and listening in the first lesson, and only reading and writing in the second. Even though my students are still shaky on the alphabet after six years of study

How much idiocy would you tolerate for a good wage? I have yet to decide.

Feast of Fools

"Things just seem to keep cropping up don't they."

There's a national fortnight's holiday coming up - the charmingly named "Feast of the Sacrifice" - and I was due to spend it with B. But he's developed family committments.

If you date an arab guy, just remember his mother always comes first. So it's not very different from dating any other guy.

I had three new students, all at different levels ranging from "doesn't know the alphabet" to "good conversational fluency"...and they wanted to study together because they're friends. And they want a special class just for them, so I can teach the absolute basics to the one third who didn't master them years ago.

Not that it matters, because they didn't turn up. Actually, almost all those who want special classes never turn up.

A teenager I taught nine months ago burst into the middle of a lesson, demanding to be seen immediately. Loudly, and repeatedly. His complaint? That on his six month old certificate of course completion, we'd transliterated his name with two Rs instead of one. He's very angry about it.

Oh and apparently my teacher's qualification must be a forgery because...something something something.

Another trio of students walked in as I was packing up, wanting to "practice conversation". They asked me to tell them about England. And then they started telling me I'd be happy if I adoped Islam. Five minutes later they decided they had an appointment elsewhere, and left looking disappointed.

There's a bank branch manager with an enormous book of management theory bullshit...which he wants me to translate into simple english, and teach him. I asked him about delegation - if the ATMs are broken, which department does he call? Answer: Marketing.

But it's not all bad. Ahmed is an english teacher from Jordan, complete with picture-postcard family and deeply humanist teaching philosophy. He's been dropping in for the last few weeks, asking about grammar and talking about how teaching children in a fun, life-affirming way makes the world a sunnier place.

My largely-absent boss has been telling me for months about how he's hired a new manager to market the school to businesses...and how he'll introduce me just as soon as there's a spare moment. Today I met the new man, and it's...Ahmed the Jordanian English teacher.

There's a big new technical college opening in town, with an english language department. The department head is James, a man so British I feel Japanese by comparison. Apart from his fluency in Spanish, German and Arabic, of course - not that I'm envious, oh no.

James needs more teachers. My contract has expired. The college runs in the morning and my school opens in the afternoon. Sounds good doesn't it?

Sexual History

How far back does your sexuality go?

At age 13 I remember finding the pictures in Playboy uninteresting - in fact some of them seemed a bit gross. It was puzzling why the other boys at school loved them so much - even the one with the pack of gay porn playing cards. I desperately wanted to get a closer look at those cards, which were being handed around as a joke.

In May 1981 I was 9, with a small collection of superhero comicbooks. One featured Captain Britain, which I thought was a dreadfully hokey name, to go with an equally hokey backstory and dialogue with enough cheese to feed Denmark for a year. The bad guy was more intriguing - an evil genius with terrible dress sense, name of 'Arcade' and creator of 'Murderworld'. That's right, I could have been a ComicCon geek.

But there were a few frames that showed off the hero's muscular frame in skintight spandex, which...provoked stong feelings in me - feelings I couldn't have described but which were unmistakable. If the artist wasn't a raving queen, it was someone who'd had a lot of practice drawing broad shouders and pert buttocks, all set off by inconsistent but convenient lighting.

Yes, the creators of comicbooks know perfectly well what hormones surge in children before puberty - and it just can't be an accident how much and how well they exploit it.

Before that...I think I was seven. The family were clustered around the TV on a winter night, watching some harmless, totally innocent teatime entertainment. A magic fantasy story of some kind. Told entirely 'through the medium of dance'. On ice.

The principle dancer. I just couldn't stop staring. At everything about his body, all the lines and curves, showed off by that sparkly blue costume. I actually had to leave the room, because I was sure my eyes were on stalks and my face must be flaming red and surely no one could miss the rocklike erection I was trying not to touch.

I didn't know what sex was, but I knew it was something I was supposed to be ashamed of.

There was a house we lived in till I was four. I remember the bedroom and the bed...and discovering that I could rub my...well, I didn't have a word for it...against the sheets, and it gave a kind of rushing tingling sensation.

The biological plumbing for getting an erection is in place by birth, and so are the nerves for all the sensations, including orgasm, even though sperm isn't manufactured for maybe a decade. A girl has the same nerve endings as a woman, long before she ovulates.

The intensity and emotional hair-trigger of adolescents is, I rather think, a continuation of the emotional sensitivity and sensuality of the child - with extra hormones added to the mix. But these extras are concerned with making reproduction possible, not with the pleasures of one's own body, nor with those of others.

It is simply empirically false to insist that a person is incapable of being sexually attracted before they're capable of reproduction. Which suggests the patterns of attraction - and fantasy - are laid down during childhood, though tastes can become modified in later life.

The conventional thinking about sexplay, that it's not the real thing, is based on confusing sexuality with reproductivity. It's like confusing the pleasure of eating with the process of digestion.

This obviously doesn't excuse the sexual abuse of children by adults - or as it usually is, by other children and adolescents. That's an issue of power, of taking from someone who can't resist. It's wrong to lock a child in a cellar and rape them for exactly the same reason it's wrong to lock a child in a cellar and beat them.

Yet we have this bizarre notion that sexual abuse is qualitively worse than other forms of abuse because it's sexual. We've got into the habit of thinking it's somehow an order of magnitude worse to stick a penis in a child's mouth than to stick a knife in.

How many ways are there to abuse a child - emotionally and physically? Probably hundreds. We're obsessed with protecting children from abuse, but by 'abuse' we somehow never seem to mean emotional abuse, or bullying, or sadism - we almost always seem to mean 'rape' or 'sexual harassment'. When an adult kills a child, the media always look for clues that he had his pants down while he was doing it. If he didn't, it's just not newsworthy.

A small but definite minority of children do enjoy being stimulated (not hurt) by adults - anyone with experience of churches or boarding schools could tell you that, though we're not supposed to admit that we know it.

Anyone who's worked in a field where pedophillia is an issue, knows that slow chatroom 'grooming' is almost a complete myth - the abuser raises what they want early in conversations with many children, and discards the majority who tell him where to go, show disinterest or don't understand.

Which means of course that some do understand and are interested. Something else we're supposed to pretend we don't know, on the grounds that acknowledging sexuality somehow exonerates sexual abusers.

It could be objected that the child who enjoys the headmaster rubbing their crotch in detention is actually enjoying the attention, or that they enjoy touching in general and they'd be equally happy with their feet being rubbed, because the crotch hasn't been made sensitive or 'special' yet by puberty.

But this is to view sexual pleasure as something other than bodily pleasure, as though it were a fundamentally different kind of feeling, felt with a ghostly second skin that has it's own unique sensations and only appears when androgens or estrogen begin to flow.

The spiritualisation of sexuality goes hand in hand with its mystification. Perhaps the real aim is mysification and the spiritualisation is only a convenient ruse.

The famously creepy NAMBLA (North America Man-Boy Love Association) likes to make the point that 'inter-generational love' doesn't necessarily have to be exploitative. Which manages to be true in strictest terms, while evading the point.

Plus it blurs the crucial distinctions inherent between '20 year-old with a 15 year-old', '...with a 10 year-old' and '...with a 5 year old".

It's interesting that NAMBA's chosen line relies on the trope that a mutually loving, presumably monogamous, presumably long term relationship legitimises the sexual act. Because that's really just a coded way of saying sex for it's own sake is bad.

Gay rights campaigners talk all the time about how gay people are just as capable of monogamy and love as everyone else, as though (a) that didn't meant they were just as incapable as everyone else, (b) only those judged morally upstanding deserve rights, and (c) figures of authority can and should make that evaluation.

If these lines were just bullshit propaganda to attract more conservative types to the cause, it would be a justifiable campaigning tactic. But it seems most people who want to radically change values in society...only want to change specific values in isolation. And it never works that way.

We live in a culture that's obsessed with youth and beauty - the younger and more beautiful the better. It's no coincidence that 'barely legal' is a selling point in porn - the obvious corollary being that younger than legal would be a bigger selling point. Just another thing we're not supposed to admit we understand.

Marketing lipstick and miniskirts to girls of seven has the same basis and the same reflex denial. Ditto the existence of pop magazines printing pictures of shirtless boybands. The entire point of boybands is to be sexy, so the question is, sexy to who? To the target audience of course - half of who are below the legal age of consent.

So, kids love to look and touch, and they also have nerve endings in their genitals. The distinction between the presexual and the sexual phases of life is so blurred that no line can be drawn. Humans don't acquire bodies and emotions at puberty.

We won't be able to cope with the consequences of this reality until we can admit the reality. Which is difficult, as right now we barely understand it.