BBC Scotland’s political editor, Brian Taylor, will have had even the lexicographers scrabbling about for a dictionary as they read one of his post-Scottish parliament election blogs on the Corporation’s Scottish news website.
Pointing out: “This is a magnificent victory for the SNP: Scotland-wide, deep and embedded. The Borders, Caithness, the whole of the North-east. Glasgow Shettleston. Everywhere”, Taylor poses the question: “The reasons?”, and then explains: ”A concatenation of circumstances which, combined, have given the SNP the most convincing and stunning victory in their history.”
According to the Chambers Compact Dictionary, which carries an Edinburgh imprint, 'concatenation' means: ‘A series of items linked together in a chain-like way’. It derives from the Latin concatenare – to chain.
Meanwhile, on the same website, a somewhat macabre picture and pun to accompany the story reporting that Tavish Scott, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, is standing down from that post.
The picture appears to show Scott in a hospital operating theatre or morgue, examining a “corpse” (albeit it a lifelike model) with the caption: ‘The Liberal Democrats are conducting a post-mortem of the party, after election night’.
