Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Journalists, burned out from writing daily "dog-bites-man" stories, dream of the elusive "man-bites-dog" story, but it happens only once in a very blue moon. Imagine, then, the astonishment of all those downtrodden hacks when "woman-beats-up-man" flashed across their screens early Thursday morning. But it wasn't just any woman who was doing the physical abusing — it was Rebekah Wade, the editor of Britain's best-selling daily newspaper, the Sun, and it wasn't just any man that she had been arrested on suspicion of assaulting. No, indeed. The alleged victim was her soap star husband, Ross Kemp. To add to the juiciness of it all, Wade had recently launched a campaign in her paper to stamp out domestic violence. And there she was now, in a police cell in the rather aptly-named Battersea, in south-west London, being subjected to fingerprinting and DNA testing.

All this is by way of introducing the letter T in our Word for the wise © stroll through the alphabet.

tabloid implies journalism that is sensationalist, bigoted and cheap, but this derogatory meaning is relatively new. The word tabloid was originally registered as a trademark by Burroughs, Wellcome in 1884 and when the great Victorian press baron Lord Northcliffe used the term to describe his half-size compact newspapers (Daily Mail, Daily Mirror) the owners of the trade mark got an injunction preventing him using the word in this way. In 1903, however, a Mr Justice Byrne ruled that despite the original pharmaceutical meaning, the word had "acquired a secondary sense in which it may legitimately be used." Thus, tabloid journalism with its huge headlines, compressed writing and dramatic images became a concentrated form of information similar in nature to the original Burroughs, Wellcome drug.

As the sun was rising over London on Thursday morning, it emerged that the Sun was working on a sensational domestic violence story that featured Martin Kemp's onscreen brother, Phil Mitchell, played by Steve McFadden. It seems he was the subject of a beating in Highgate, north London by a former girlfriend. Police said they were called to McFadden's home at 9.35am on Wednesday and arrested Angela Bostock outside the house for alleged assault. She was cautioned and released. Meanwhile, over in Wandsworth Prison, Rebekah Wade, 37, ...

Next week, we're at "U". Candidates include "U" and "non-U".