Relativist recidivism

The BBC link I gave in my last post now leads to something approaching the actual story, which is intriguing. I've been trying and failing to dig up Google's cache of the page from Monday afternoon (it seems that the BBC requested their pages not be archived, which is comfortingly transparent for a news organisation: "No, we never reported that. This page always said this!"), when Mr. Livingstone's fatuous remarks were almost dismissively mentioned towards the end of an otherwise entirely unremarkable article about his trip to Beijing. This is particularly odd, since I got the story from the print media on Monday afternoon, which means it had to have been a story for getting on for 24 hours by the time the BBC were making absolutely nothing of it. Now that it's refused to go away, of course, they have to make grudging efforts to be seen to be actually reporting the news - but see how the story is trivialised, even dismissed, before you've actually read it by the use of inverted commas around 'comparison'.

That's the first time I've had cause to type "Beijing", by the way, which reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. I very nearly typed "Peking", for the same reason I would type Cologne instead of Köln, Moscow instead of Muskva, Prague instead of Praha, etc.. Wikipedia points out that it was the traditional Anglicisation prior to a sound change in Mandarin (how does that work, by the way? Is there a decree? "This character now sounds like this. It never sounded like that!"), so I suppose the modern use of Beijing is just about acceptable, but for the fact that no-one seems to realise it's not pronounced bay-jing (soft J) but is, in fact, pronounced by-jing (hard J). (However, I still delight in the reproachful looks I can generate from a certain type of person should I ever have cause to talk about Bombay, Madras or Bangalore.)