Guardian Best Written Blog Competition winner Belle de Jour has apparantly been outed as a professional writer from Manchester.
According to American literary detective Don Foster – who subjected Belle’s writing style to a detailed analysis – the blog’s author is unlikely to be a literate London call girl as claimed and fingers journalist and author Sarah Champion as the blog author instead.
According to Foster he
identified quirks in Belle’s text, such as the way she uses brackets, dashes, compound verbs and italics. He entered this information into Google, the internet search engine, and within 20 minutes found that Miss Champion was the only person who matched the linguistic fingerprint.
He may well be on to something. At Harry’s Place we recently had a serial commenter who kept changing the name he commented under but provided other commenters with hours of amusement by using the same phrase “ad hominem” ad nauseam. He also managed to wrongly misspell the same words under his various different guises.
Anonymous bloggers and commenters beware !