The article begins:
Originally “disgust” was used to express distaste for rotten food or filth. Today it’s deployed against looters, phone hackers and others whose actions many find morally murky. So how did the meaning change so much?

The author, who appears to have been to university, doesn’t seem to know the meaning of “meaning”. Not a good start. She continues, self-contradictorily:
[Disgust] was not a word at [Shakespeare's] disposal – it only entered the English language towards the end of his life.

Hmm. Not going well. Not wanting to be outdone in this festival of bollocks, up steps Gerry Breslin, who works for a dictionary:
Nowadays people and attitudes can disgust us rather than tastes and smells. The verb has lost its currency, but we do use the adjective disgusting to cover all of these usages.

At which point, with impeccable comic timing, Ms Lane asks “But what disgusts us most?”

It turns out that this isn’t a proper article about language at all, it’s just an advert for a survey the BBC is conducting about morality.

p.s. Notice that Ms Lane’s attempt to be scientific by resorting to the Google n-gram viewer is doomed to failure. As Michael Grant writes in a comment:

1. On Tuesday the 9th, Haroon Jahan and two other men were senselessly killed in Birmingham. The next day Haroon’s father, Tariq Jahan, said the memorable and affecting line:

“I lost my son – step forward if you want to lose your sons, otherwise calm down and go home.”

Apart from the extraordinary eloquence of Mr Jahan’s speech, grief-stricken as he clearly was, the other thing I noticed, not immediately, but the second time I heard it, was that it wasn’t meant as a threat, and didn’t come across as a threat, but it was certainly open to interpretation as a threat. Perhaps that was what was so remarkable: to turn words that in other circumstances would’ve been seen as a threat, into an earnest and heartfelt plea for peace. Rhetorically, it was quite a feat.

2. One afternoon, listening to Radio WM, I was struck by a caller’s use of the word “minority”. She said something along the lines that she understood that it was only the small minorities that were involved in the riots/looting. It occurred to me that since there is an important difference in meaning between “minority” and “minorities” it’s rather unfortunate that the two expressions are virtually the same and prone to confusion. I wonder of she was the only person who, hearing that only a “small minority” were involved, thought that meant that the ethnic minorities were responsible?

3. Finally, an interesting sentence from the report into the disturbances published today by the chief constable of West Midlands Police:

Very soon into Monday evening came the strategic and tactical reappraisal which led to the notion that the police response must be to maximise the number of lawful arrests in order to remove rioters from the streets and, critically, re-establish the sense of deterrence that for complex reasons seems to have been temporarily lost. (page 29)

“Otto von Habsburg, once heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died this week at the age of 98, days after Hungary handed the rotating European Union presidency to its neighbour, Poland.”

Slovaks will be less than impressed with this, since Slovakia, once part of the Hungarian Empire, is inbetween Poland and Hungary.
But wait, in the comments section, here comes the author of the article to attempt to justify his word choice:

bpwriter wrote: Jul 8th 2011 1:05 GMT .I am the author of this article – thanks for the lively comments and I hope the debate continues. One small point: the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the word “neighbour” as follows:

- ie, in this context neighbouring countries do not necessarily have to share a border. Slovakia can rest assured, the Economist is well aware of its existence.

Justifying your use of the word by reference to a dictionary? Come on. In the context of my street, of course “neighbours” doesn’t just mean the people who live at numbers 17 and 21 (We’re at no. 19) but in the context of central European geography, calling Poland and Hungary “neighbours” is dumb provocation.

This book is mainly of interest for the piece called “Ware, Wye, Watford (1)”. As you can see, it’s a spoof dictionary of English placenames, an idea that was taken up with much success by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in their bestselling “The Meaning of Liff” (1983).

Although I can find no suggestion that they copied the idea from Jennings, the Wikipedia page about the Liff book says that Adams apologised to him.

It appears that there may be more than one version of this piece. A commenter on a BBC page mentions Jennings’ definition for Dunstable: possible. “If ’tis dunstable he’ll do’t, my lord.” (Shakespeare)

*I prefer the American spelling of this word…