It’s a well-known adage that Britain and the United States are 2 countries divided by a common language.
However, that doesn’t seem to stop constant encroachment from over the other side of the Atlantic, as illustrated by the following letter from yesterday’s The Grauniad (dead tree edition).
Today is St George’s Day, the saint’s day of England’s patron saint and the purported day of Shakespeare’s birth (as well as being the day of his actual death in 1616. Ed.).
George was first adopted as England’s patron saint in the 14th century, when he was given the job and his predecessor St Edmund the Martyr, the 9th century king of East Anglia, was given the medieval equivalent of his P45. Nevertheless, traces of a cult of St George in England are discernible from the 9th century onwards in the form of a liturgy used at that time at Durham Cathedral, a 10th century Anglo-Saxon martyrology and in dedications to Saint George at Fordington in Dorset, Thetford in Norfolk, Southwark and Doncaster.
According to legend, George was a Roman soldier of Greek origin and officer in the guard of the Roman emperor Diocletian, who ordered his death for George failing to recant his Christian faith.
Looking at patronage, George is much more than the patron saint of England. Four other countries also have him as their patron saint, i.e.:
Furthermore, George is also the patron saint of Spain’s autonomous communities of Aragon and Catalonia.
The best known feat about St George is his alleged dragon slaying. Just like his being a member of Diocletian’s guard, this is also legend. In the medieval romances, the lance with which Saint George is said to have slain the dragon was called Ascalon after the Levantine city of Ashkelon, which is in the modern state of Israel. As regards any factual basis for the legend, some evidence links the legend back to very old Egyptian and Phoenician sources in a late antique statue of Horus fighting a “dragon”. This links the legendary George – who should not be confused with the historical George – to various ancient sources of mythology around the eastern Mediterranean.
Speaking of dragons, the Old English Wordhord Twitter account came up with “ligdraca” – a fire-drake or dragon vomiting flames – for St George’s Day.
Celebrating St George’s Day has been more common in the past in England, although there have been times when it was celebrated less or not at all.
Indeed, Keith Flett informs us that its celebration was popular until the Reformation, but it was still marked. Under the Commonwealth, its celebration was banned in 1645 under the Long Parliament which sat from 1640 to 1660. When the English in their folly decided to invite Charles Stuart back in 1660 after the death of Cromwell, celebrating St George’s Day was restored.
Unlike St Andrew’s Day in Scotland, St George’s Day is not a public holiday (confusingly called a bank holiday in British English. Ed.). Indeed the countries of the United Kingdom have amongst the lowest numbers of public holidays in the developed world, whilst the UK as a whole has the the fewest of any G20 country or EU member state.
Whether to respond to this shortcoming or not, it’s been reported today that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will announce that Labour will introduce four new bank holidays – one for each of the patron saints of the countries making up the United Kingdom – if the party wins the forthcoming general election. This will be sold on the doorstep as a measure “to give workers the break they deserve“: and that’s definitely something for which I can vote.
The first bug hunting session for LibreOffice 5.4 – the next major release of this popular free and open source office suite – has been announced on The Document Foundation blog.
LibreOffice 5.4 is due to be released at the end of July with many new features: those already implemented are summarised on the release notes wiki page; and there are still more new features to be disclosed.
The LibreOffice QA team is organizing the first Bug Hunting Session on Friday 28th April to find, report and triage bugs. Testing will be carried out on the first alpha release of LibreOffice 5.4, which will be made available (for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows) on the pre-releases server shortly before the session.
Full details of the event are available on the specific wiki page.
Mentors to help testers report and confirm bugs will be available on 28th April from 8.00 a.m. UTC to 10.00 p.m. UTC. Moreover, as this this particular Alpha release (LibreOffice 5.4.0 Alpha1) will be available until the middle of May, hunting bugs will also be possible on other days.
During the day there will be two dedicated sessions: the first to chase bugs on the main LibreOffice modules between 3.00 p.m. UTC and 5.00 p.m. UTC; and the second to test a set of the top 7 features between 5.00 p.m. UTC and 7.00 p.m. UTC.
When the UK’s not at all unelected Prime Minister announced her intention to seek parliamentary approval for a snap general election earlier this week, I asked my Twitter followers via a poll who was likely to be writing the Conservative Party manifesto.
The poll is now closed and there’s a surprise winner.
Your correspondent was fully expecting the party’s manifesto to be written by the usual suspects – the owners and editors of the British right wing press, but alas Twitter – or the part thereof with which I’m in touch – thinks differently.
The question that must now be asked is whether Conservative Party Central Office have time to translate the party’s manifesto into English and Welsh (if for once the Tories have stopped treating Wales as an English colony. Ed.) from the original Russian once Vladimir Vladimirovich has completed his draft? In the immortal words of Private Eye: I think we should be told! 😀
Today’s Daily Mail front page is in full censorious mode following the announcement yesterday morning of a snap election by the UK’s not at all unelected Prime Minister.
As can be seen, those who voted remain in last year’s EU referendum have now been reclassified by the Mail. We’re no longer Remoaners, but Saboteurs.
Indeed the Mail headline has been greatly exercising the Twittersphere this morning, with its wording being compared with both extreme wings of politics (the phrase “Crush the Saboteurs” was first used by Lenin in January 1919. Ed.), with several reminders of the Mail’s infamous Hurrah for the Blackshirts headline from January 1934.
Since this morning Mrs May has defended the Mail’s intemperate stance and headline, pleading “freedom of the press”. Some would argue freedom comes with a sense of responsibility attached, Mrs May.
As someone who voted remain in the referendum and still regards the course towards a so-called hard Brexit favoured by the Prime Minister and entailing leaving the Single Market, the course of action she is advocating looks to me like the ultimate sabotage.
As a person whose life is built around words, the definition and etymology of the word sabotage interests me.
According to Dictionary.com, sabotage has the following meanings as a noun:
.
Sabotage can also be used as a verb, meaning to injure or attack by sabotage.
As regards the origins of sabotage, it came into use in English in the late 19th/early 20th century, emanating from the French, equivalent to sabot(er) to botch, orig., to strike, shake up, harry, derivative of sabot, which dates back to the 13th century and denotes a clog or wooden shoe. Sabot originates from an unidentified source that also produced similar words in Old Provençal, Portuguese, Spanish (zapata), Italian (ciabatta), Arabic (sabbat) and Basque (zapata).
As regards sabotage in the context of the UK’s relationship with the European Union/EEC, it must be remembered that the Europhobes (later called Eurosceptics. Ed.) were moaning even before the ink was dry on the signatures of Edward Heath, Alec Douglas-Home and Geoffrey Rippon on the 1972 Treaty of Accession.
The Europhobes have consistently sabotaged Britain’s relationship with Europe ever since and, as someone who is diametrically opposed to their plans, I am therefore proud to declare: “Je suis saboteur!”
On Twitter, the ITI has kindly pointed out a terminological error in last week’s Guardian. I appeared in the text of the article shown below, taken on the occasion of the UK’s not at all unelected prime minister Theresa May’s visit to those nice people in Saudi Arabia who are kind enough to buy lots of weapons off the British for use in Yemen.
The person identified as Person 2 is described as “the most important person in the room, the translator”.
I’m afraid you are wrong there, Grauniad. He may be the most important person in the room, but alas he is no translator.
The error of the Grauniad’s ways was helpfully pointed out in a letter on Tuesday by fellow linguist Jane Straker and her letter is reproduced in full below.
The big picture (5 April) was good and the numbered captions helpful. It was a boost for our profession to have the man below the late King Abdullah’s portrait described as “perhaps the most important person in the room”. However, translators are not normally people who listen and speak (sometimes simultaneously) in meetings: that is the job of interpreters. Some translators are trained to interpret, but they usually excel at writing, keyboard skills and carefully honing text. Speech is not writing; transfer of meaning between languages and cultures requires not only accuracy, speed and clarity, but impartiality. Interpreters should have no vested interest in the outcome of a meeting. It would be useful to know whether Theresa May had a British Arabic-English interpreter in her delegation.
To avoid future blunders and save interpreters from putting pen to paper – or fingers to keyboard – passing Grauniad (& other) journalists are advised to consult my handy illustrated guide to translators and interpreters.
Some linguists have remarked that the two sides of the profession should stop being so pedantic about terminology. However, I believe terminological exactitude is a crucial skill for both translators and interpreters. Give your thoughts in the comments below.
On Sunday 6th May, Tidy BS5 is organising a Beating the Bounds event from 11.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. This will be a 5 km jaunt around parts of BS5, starting at Lawrence Hill roundabout, finishing at by the library at Junction 3 in Baptist Mills, tidying up places as we go.
We’ll be joined on the walk by Bristol’s elected mayor, Marvin Rees, who spent part of his childhood in Easton and whose mum still lives here.
The publicity materials giving route details and rough timings are posted below.
Hope to see you there!
The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of warped record, has recently revamped its website, which now uses the standard template for Mirror Group titles.
In addition, the standard of what passed in recent decades for journalism from the title seems to have taken a dive too. Whether this is related to the change of template cannot be corroborated.
One thing that has not changed is the inability of the Post’s reporters to concentrate on the most relevant facts of a story.
An example from today is shown in the screenshot below.
The story itself relates that the Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) suffered 3 cyber attacks involving ransomware last year.
This is only to be expected if major organisations continue to base their IT infrastructure on Microsoft’s insecure operating systems.
For me, the important point was on the front page as shown in the screenshot, according which the BRI now comes under the aegis of the National Health Service, although for some unfathomable reason, there is no mention whatsoever in the article itself of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
To echo the purported words of a proper, old-school journalist, the late Bill Deedes, “Shome mishtake shurely?” 🙂
On Tuesday March 21st, your correspondent had a special appointment to keep up at the Mansion House in Clifton, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of Bristol.
The occasion was the presentation of Lord Mayor’s Medals to what Jeff Lovell, the current Lord Mayor, described in his opening remarks as “community champions”.
Only some 20 medals are awarded each year and your ‘umble scribe was a recipient this year.
According to the citation, I was commended for my work in the voluntary and community sector in East Bristol, including all the Tidy BS5 efforts to make Easton and Lawrence Hill a cleaner, more pleasant environment.
However, I was not the only recipient with a BS5 postcode. Three other locals received recognition.
Hannah Crudgington was recognised for her work for Tidy BS5 (particularly her videos. Ed.) and her efforts to show a more positive side to Easton than is generally given by the local media.
Bruce Yates was commended for his work in turning around local youth organisation Baggator at The Pickle Factory in All Hallows Road, as well as his work for RADE Bristol, which campaigns for inner-city clean air and against efforts to install polluting standby electricity generating plant in the city.
Last but not least, Amy Harrison received a medal for her work for Up Our Street.
All four of us are shown in the photograph below.
It was, all told, a lovely afternoon, which was made even more special by a surprise visit by my eldest niece Katherine and boyfriend Martyn, who were subsequently treated to a night on the tiles in Easton.
Standards of English in the media continue to plumb new depths as per the tweet below.
Why a crocodile would want to impress a British backpacker is unclear. In the immortal words of Private Eye, I think we should be told. 😀
Hat tip: Harriet Johnson.