As with all knowledge, once you knew it, you couldn't imagine how it was that you hadn't known it before. (Atwood, 2010, p.224).

But Science is merely one way of describing the world. (Atwood, 2010, p.430).

Toby took up macrame, hoping it would cure her of her daydreaming and fruitless desires, and increase her focus on the moment. (Atwood, 2010, p.229).

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Last week I got asked to speak at an event called Slut Night, at a new venture called The Other Club in central London. Organised by some bright young feminists, Slut Night sold out surprisingly fast, as it offered various female writers and performers talking explicitly about the joys of sluttishness. The fanny jokes ran as freely as the wine; it was a right laugh. But when I first heard the name of the event, my immediate reaction was, ugh. That word. Slut. No.

My immediate reaction should probably have been more specifically – ugh, slut is a grubby little insult and I want no part of it. Ugh, slut is used to pass judgment on women's desires, their social life, the tightness of fabric around their bum, and I'm not interested in trying to reclaim that degree of damage because language reclamation is a pseudo-alchemy and no abusive thing ever turned into a good thing because you sucked the poison out of the sting yourself. Also, ugh, sluttishness – if sexual promiscuity is as emancipatory as I used to think it was, then how come it could only ever emancipate me in cahoots with tequila, kebabs and a really uncomfortable feeling when anyone used highly stressful words such as "commitment" or "love"?

But no, my immediate reaction was: ugh, no to sluts – I'd much rather be a slag. You know where you are with the word slag. You are, in my mind, in the closing scene of the greatest film ever made, Rita, Sue and Bob Too, written by the brilliant Andrea Dunbar and filmed in 1980s Bradford.

This is a spoiler, so look away now if you haven't yet seen the greatest film ever made. It closes with the two teenagers, Rita and Sue, lying in Bob's bed. His wife has left him because he's been sneaking off and shagging these schoolgirls in his car. The girls' home lives have fallen apart, too, so one after the other, they've moved in with him. Yes, this is all very creepy, and nobody's saying it's a film that depicts a utopian model of living to which we should all aspire. It's grim. Still, after everything has gone really, horribly wrong, there is a moment of sheer joy when Bob finds them both in his bed and dives right into it. They all beam with happiness. The film ends there – on that dive – a moment of joy that we know can't and won't last. The pure joy of being a slag – as the other characters in the film have already labelled them – Bob, of course, being the biggest slag of them all.

Why I like slag so much is not because I want to cast aspersions on people's sexual shenanigans, but because it has now become a great all-round handy insult. If you're not convinced, look how skilfully the actor Danny Dyer once deployed the term to discuss terrorism. "Can't believe it's been nearly 11 years since them slags smashed into the twin towers," he tweeted on 11 September 2012. "It still freaks my nut out to this day."

Still, I should admit here that my fondness for the word slag doesn't always end well for me. I still shudder with guilt when I think of the time I tweeted a friend and told her to bring another friend, "that slag", with her to my house. As a joke. It's a word we use between ourselves, fondly. Only, when I tagged the slag friend, I got her Twitter name slightly wrong and accidentally directed the message to a total stranger with a similar name – who turned out to be a 15-year-old girl in a coma. Whose Twitter account was being run by her loving dad to raise awareness of his daughter's condition. All he could see was that London journalists were insulting his sick child – it took quite a lot of explanation to dig my way out of that one and apologise. Possibly not helped by my friend tweeting him and saying: "No, you don't understand, it was definitely meant for me and not your daughter, because I really am a massive, massive slag."

I recently met a media studies lecturer who told me he uses #slaggate as an example for his students of how not to use Twitter. Oh God.

Still, slut feels like a very American word – even if British grandmothers did use it to describe a messy woman who left things on her bedroom floor, not a woman who left her knickers on other people's bedroom floors. Slut is now a word for online porn ads, popping up all over your screen saying that horny sluts with breasts like balloons and buttocks like boiled eggs would like to live-chat with you now.

Indeed, it turned out that the Slut Night I went to was not about praising the word at all. As the organiser Amelia Abraham explained: "The goal isn't to reclaim the word 'slut'; it's to completely undermine it."

Slutwalks, organised in cities across the world in defence of women dressing how they want without fear of assault, received criticism from some feminists who felt the word was wrong. I realise they were named after the exact words of a Canadian policeman, but still – I'd probably have gone if they were called slagwalks instead. Let's not put the word slag on the linguistic slagheap. (Heawood, 2013).

Students often report that they learn more from working on a project with other people than they do from individual assignments. (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.3-4).

Many problems faced by groups are a result of poor (or complete lack of) communication ...

Often groups run into difficulties because they have not organised sufficiently to have a grip on who is supposed to be doing what and by when. (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.10).

Belbin’s team roles


Implementer = gets things done and focuses on practical issues

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• Coordinator = orgnises the task and other group members
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• Shaper = inspires and leads the group
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• Plant = generates ideas and being creative
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• Resource investigator =  identifies useful resources
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• Monitor/evaluator =  evaluates ideas and proposals and identifies problems
• 
  
• Team worker = gets team members to cooperate
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• Completer/finisher = works to deadlines and gets jobs done
• 
  
• Specialist = provides specialist technical expertise (Hartley and Dawson, 2012, p.53-54).
• 
  

Toby took up macrame, hoping it would cure her of her daydreaming and fruitless desires, and increase her focus on the moment. (Atwood, 2010, p.229).

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