Looters to the Court of St. James

Doubtless you shared Sordel's shock. An ambassador was among those recently rioting in London! Some Ruritanian minor nobility, one might presume, tired of cowering behind the windows of his embassy in silk sash and monocle while the people of England marched for civil rights and HDMI cables.

But, hang on.

It was an Olympics ambassador.

One of the things that the media are very good at is inventing grandiloquently entitled professions when it suits them. Robert Sebbage, murdered while on holiday in Greece, was evidently an England mascot which, with all deference to his better qualities, seemed to be a stretch of terminology.

A 17-year-old who turned herself into the police for looting Richer Sounds, "had been learning ballet since the age of seven and fears that she will now lose her place at dance school". Sordel tends to think the age of seven as a rather late start for ballet, but she is described by The Times as a ballerina which, on the evidence of the article, is both unlikely and something of an insult to proper ballerinas, who are typically the principal dancers in ballet companies.

Our "Olympic ambassador" is Chelsea Ives, an athlete whose competition results are readily available online. Her main disciplines would appear to involve running, throwing things and jumping (skills for which she may have found a practical use) but being a reasonably promising sportswoman and one of eight thousand doing voluntary work to promote the Olympics does not make her an Olympic "ambassador", except in the fevered brains of news editors and the British Olympic committee: neither of whom are strangers to overstatement.

Gushing lists of these glorious occupations were trotted out in newspapers, wall posts and tweets. Graphic designers evidently bathe in champagne and have white truffles for loofahs. Social workers have uniforms of spun gold with diamond inlay. Semi-professional footballers (ah, how it must have hurt the news editors to add that semi-) use bankers for their footstools and millionaires for their spitoons.

The problem with this "title inflation" is that the impression has been given that - far from those suffering from social deprivation - the rioters were all members of the urban nobility, living it large, them with their degrees and flashy careers.

One problem with rioting? It leads to a lot of heat, and not so much light.