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Reg lexicographical Shock Army liberates mobe

ICT confirmed dead amid ruins of linguistic conservatism

A Vulture Central lexicographical Shock Army spokesman this morning confirmed combined forces of inevitability and good sense had liberated mobe and lappy from the axis of linguistic conservatism which had only too recently threatened English with hideous fossilisation. Standing in the burning ruins of grammatical common decency, he declared: "I dunno, prolly same old forever, innit, eh?"

Amid scenes of bitter fighting, troops of the elite Middle Englander division - notorious for its habit of punishing misuse of the word "decimate" by selecting a random village and "reducing" it by exactly one tenth - pitched a desperate last-ditch stand against El Reg's determined "Boffin Battalion", which deployed carelessly-improvised adjectives as adverbs in vicious street-to-street fighting for control of the English language.

One combatant, who led the final assault on the key DailyMailStag, admitted later: "Yeah, well, like, we went real careful, but then there's this one bloke down in a cellar and he's shouting like, 'We will surrender but only if you guarantee the proper use of the apostrophe during the negotiations,' so we're like fuck that and we throw in a few grenades' and a couple of greengrocers apostrofes for good measure."

By 10am, advance units of the Geezer Grenadiers had fought their way to within 100 metres of the last bastion of Mother English, where ICT and his mistress Eva Aspirated-Wh w(h)ere already making plans to swallow prussic acid, thereby denying the "forces of darkness" the satisfaction of hanging them along with thousands of participles already left dangling by the uneducated masses. But then news came across the front lines of a possible surrender deal.

ICT's sinister Strategy Boutique had held several controversial terms - including mobe and lappy - hostage with a view to an eventual cross onto the American side of the front line. While viewing the "Yanks" as linguistic barbarians who'd "gotten way ahead of themselves", they were prepared to deprive their children of the odd extraneous "u" as an alternative to the nightmare possibility in which their offspring lost the ability to pronounce the "tt" in "butter".

In the end, negotiations literally broke down on the use of "literally", with neither side able to agree a compromise as to how may "literallys" an Englishman might use during once sentence. The failure was later described as "literally a disaster".

And it was - literally. The onslaught which followed claimed an estimated 10,000 archaic terms, deployed in desperation by ICT's rapidly-formed Volksterm, armed only with a small pocket grammar of proper English and the motto "Better dead than brown bread".

The rest is now history. ICT's lifeless body was soon discovered burnt to a crisp, but described by a Reg pathologist as "immediately recognisable by the utterly useless extra letter he'd added to a hitherto perfectly serviceable acronym".

Vulture Central forces quickly found mobe and lappy huddled together in a prison cellar, having apparently been subjected to the most hideous humiliation including having to wear the "Gyles Brandreth" armband of shame - denoting their non-Anglo-Saxon origins.

Mobe told his liberators: "Yeah, sweet, give us a mobe. I've just got to text the missus." ®

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