LONDON: Supermodel Naomi Campbell was acclaimed for nonsense today after winning the Plain English Campaign's annual “Foot in Mouth” prize. The London-born catwalk star scooped this year's award for her patriotic observation on British cuisine: “I love England, especially the food. There's nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta.”

Campbell beat Wales's First Minister Rhodri Morgan to the dubious honour of the year's best example of mixed metaphor, mangled syntax or plain stupidity, robbing him of a hat-trick of wins.

The Labour Party politician said in a Welsh Assembly debate: “But obviously the issue is that if you had another 450 million pounds from somewhere else, you have got another 450 million pounds, but what does that tell you?

“That is like saying, if my auntie was a bloke, she would be my uncle.”

Former England cricketer Geoffrey Boycott got two nominations while US President George W. Bush chipped in with one.

Boycott, now a commentator, mused that “the proof of the pudding is at the end of the day” and “I'll cross that chestnut when I come to it”.

On the sticky problem of six-party talks on North Korea, Bush -- whose idiosyncratic use of the English language has spawned the term “Bushism” — said: “One has a strong hand when there's more people playing your same cards.” Dave Smith, from the Plain English Campaign, told AFP the examples are light-hearted but their annual awards still showed the need for public documents to be written in clear English that everyone can understand.

The British-based Australian academic and writer Germaine Greer won the campaign's “Golden Bull” award, which recognises the “worst examples of written tripe”.

The feminist author of “The Female Eunuch” wrote in her arts column in The Guardian on October 23: “The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold.”

Smith said the sentence might make perfect sense but it was an example of academic jargon that should remain in publications like arts journals, not newspapers.

“If I wanted to know more about art and read something like that, it would put me off,” he said.

The awards for the best and worst use of English will be held in London tomorrow.—AFP