"No!" he snorts scornfully, perhaps thinking of the speed of his own departure from the BBC.
Self-flagellation was seen at its most merciless in last weekend's For The Record column in the Observer, where readers' editor Stephen Pritchard was characteristically stern in taking a classical CD reviewer to task for praising an oboist for his "almost 40 minutes of continuous solo" in Vaughan Williams's oboe concerto – in reality "the piece lasts barely 20 minutes", he pointed out scornfully.
His book points scornfully to Mr Murdoch's quaint love of ink and old forms of media.
To no avail: the top civil servant in the defence ministry scornfully dismissed the court's ruling.
DAVID FRUM sums up my own feelings about the dismal state of America's conservative movement exactly: A movement that had begun as an intellectual one now scornfully pooh-poohed the need for people in government to know anything much at all.
They speak scornfully of Shenzhen, a freewheeling "special economic zone" bordering on Hong Kong beloved of China's liberal economists.
The opposition Conservatives scornfully accuse the government of peddling "rehashed ideas" without offering concrete plans.
A measure of the prime minister's pessimism over his election chances is his eagerness to participate in what he described scornfully less than a year ago as "a stupid PR stunt".
The government scornfully dismissed the criticism: better to provide shelter than ponder it in interminable working groups.From inside Gaiozi's bungalow, however, the critics had a point: the walls were damp, the roof leaky and worms occasionally emerge through the floorboards.
In fact, as even anti-regime Iranian exile groups say, Mr Khomeini scornfully rejected a 1988 letter from Mohsen Rezai, then the commander of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, demanding nuclear weapons (and a wide array of other arms) to ensure the Iranian regime would never again face a humiliating defeat, as it did near the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
Television ads for Mitt Romney show earnest youngsters scornfully intoning the 2008 slogans they once found so inspiring.
