Boris Johnson has been honoured with the Golden Bull award, a prize handed out annually by the Plain English Campaign, that highlights the "worst example of written tripe" from the past year.
Despite the Mayor's many baffling public exhortations, it was a small missive to promote the Cycle Hire scheme that earned Boris the coveted gong. A press release from TfL contained a Mayoral quote that referred to:
"A cyclised city of pioneers"
Compared to some of the Mayor's prior experiments with the mother tongue, this is a mild malaprop at best. Indeed, Boris has previous form with the Plain English Campaign: in 2004 he was awarded the Foot in Mouth award for the following utterance, during a guest slot on Have I Got News For You:
"I could not fail to disagree with you less".
And that's before we get into his forthright comments on such topics as Ken Bigley, the city of Portsmouth, and the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea.
Photo / Simon Kember.
