Language | Steve Woods

American Idiots

02/01/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Another day, another social media post showing how unaware some people are of the world about them, particularly in relation to popular music and politics.

Green Day is an American rock band with a reputation of not being afraid to include political content in their lyrics.

Take the song American Idiot, for instance.

Released in 2004, it’s a protest song critical of the policies of the then US President, one George W. Bush, particularly his response to the atrocities of September 11 and his subsequent launch of the so-called War on Terror. It clearly went down well upon release as it was nominated for four 2005 Grammy Awards: Record of the Year, Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, Best Rock Song and Best Music Video. According to Wikipedia, it is considered one of the band’s signature songs.

As a prominent element of Green Day’s discography, the band performed it on ABC’s broadcast of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest, but with a modern update, used the opportunity to call out Trump supporters by changing one word in the original lyrics, amending the line “I’m not part of a redneck agenda” to “I’m not part of the MAGA agenda“.
This did not go down well with the right-leaning part of the populace of the 50 states, who denounced the band on social media.

Then there were those like the gentleman in the screenshot* below, who seems totally oblivious to the blatantly political content of the original song or did not engage brain before placing fingers on keyboard and posting the following,an action which resulted in him ending up with his foot firmly inserted in his mouth.

For the benefit of Mr Starzynski and his like, your ‘umble scribe has transcribed the full, original lyrics of American Idiot below. 😀

Don’t wanna be an American idiot
Don’t want a nation under the new media
And can you hear the sound of hysteria?
The subliminal mind fuck America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Well maybe I’m the faggot America
I’m not a part of a redneck agenda
Now everybody do the propaganda
And sing along to the age of paranoia

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Don’t want to be an American idiot
One nation controlled by the media
Information age of hysteria
It’s calling out to idiot America

Welcome to a new kind of tension
All across the alienation
Where everything isn’t meant to be okay
Television dreams of tomorrow
We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
For that’s enough to argue

Have a Happy New Year, y’all!

* = Courtesy of George Takei‘s Mastodon account.
Hey Boss! I’ve found a Huge typo!

31/12/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

In the general torpor that obtains around this time of year, the proofreader at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth, otherwise know as the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live (a Retch plc publication. Ed.) has been caught in flagrante delicto asleep at his/her desk.

Today the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live published a piece on its website of great interest to price-conscious followers of fashion that would enable them to save hundreds of pounds, as per the screenshot below.

A saving of £1,288? That’s Hugo!

I’ve never heard of Huge Boss myself, but the paper’s author Emma Grimshaw clearly has as the name appears not just in the headline, but in the copy itself.

Primark fans are rushing to buy the chain’s ‘retro’ black dress. The £12 item also looks very similar to a Huge Boss outfit, but costs a fraction of the price.

Your ‘umble scribe has, however, heard of Hugo Boss AG of Metzingen, Germany which like its rival Huge Boss as per the Post/Bristol Live also sells ‘luxury‘, i.e. overpriced, clothing and fashion accessories.

In the world of intellectual/imaginary property, Huge Boss’ behaviour is known as passing off, i.e. misrepresenting the goodwill of an established company.

If the Bristol (Evening) Post/Bristol Live ever gets round to reporting the trade mark dispute between Hugo Boss AG and Huge Boss, your ‘umble scribe hopes it employs someone who knows how to proofread copy to do the job!. 😀
“Much lover,” my luvver?

27/12/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Further evidence arrives today of the continuing decline of journalistic standards at Reach plc titles – already a bar so low it’s in danger of touching the ground.

The proof: the author of this piece in today’s Bristol (Evening) Post/Live cannot even spell one of the title’s favourite clichés – much-loved – opting for a Bristolian sounding but meaningless much lover instead.

What is even more surprising is that the author is an award-winner within the journalistic trade.

If the qualityu control for press articles is as low as that down at Bristol’s Temple Way Ministry of Truth, your ‘umble scribe wonders just how much lower it must be where gongs for hacks are involved… :-D.
LibreOffice Nepalese Localisation Sprint

22/12/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech

Language localisation is the process of adapting a product’s translation to a specific country or region. It forms the second phase of a larger process of product translation and cultural adaptation (for specific countries, regions, cultures or groups) to account for differences in distinct markets, a process known as internationalisation and localisation.

The Document Foundation blog today reports on the Localisation Sprint held in October and November by the LibreOffice Nepali community in October and November, which bore the tagline “Unlock Native: LibreOffice Speaks Nepali“.

Image courtesy of The Document Foundation blog.

The sprint was mentored by localisation expert Saroj Dhakal, Suraj Bhattarai, LibreOffice’s liaison officer and Kathmandu University engineering student Aadarsha Dhakal. Kkey open source community and student clubs from different part of Nepal were invited and the invitation was generously accepted by AskBuddie, Kathmandu University Open Source Community (KUOSC), Birendra Open Source Club (BOSC), and Nepal Open Source Klub (NOSK). Furthermore, many volunteers came forward and expressed their willingness to join in and contribute to the LibreOffice project.

As many of the volunteers were new to the process, mentors made participants familiar with the localisation process in our tools, with a quick demonstration on how to proceed with strings, checks and different glossary terms.

Due to major festivities there was a 19 day gap in the sprint, which eventually ended in November (making it the third longest ever Nepalese localisation event. Ed.) after several thousand strings had been localised. Well done all in Nepal!
Seasonal pedantry

20/12/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

It’s that time of year again and, much to the discomfiture of my dear sister, Slade and Wizzard are busy filling the space in the Temples of Mammon with their decades-old guaranteed pension payment ‘Christmas’ songs, whilst in less venal environments, ‘Bah! Humbug!’ is being exclaimed by curmudgeons embracing their inner Ebenezer Scrooge and in yet other spaces, carols are being sung; and not just in church either.
According to Wikipedia, the English word carol is derived from the Old French word carole, a circle dance accompanied by singers. Carole itself is derived from the Latin choraula. Carols were very popular as dance songs from the 1150s to the 1350s, after which their use expanded as processional songs sung during festivals, whilst others were written to accompany religious mystery plays (such as the “Coventry Carol“, written before 1534).
Just as in normal speech, punctuation is important in singing as it determines how the words are to be sung and with what emphasis.

How many readers have noted the comma in God rest you merry, gentlemen? The comma is essential to denote that the menfolk in question are being wished a merry time, which is a somewhat different prospect from what is brought to mind by the comma-less merry gentlemen who have clearly been indulging in Christmas cheer and probably need a lie-down and a nap.

Here’s a handy video to explain the pendantry.

For those who doubt the existence of the comma, here’s the sheet music for confirmation.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Tip o’ the hat: David Allen Green
LibreOffice news – a beta and a pledge

14/12/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Open Source, Open Standards, Tech
Yesterday saw the release of the first beta version of LibreOffice 24.2, the forthcoming next version of this popular free and open source office suite, which is due for release on February 2024, as announced on the LibreOffice QA blog.

Your ‘umble scribe has already downloaded the beta from the development builds server for testing. So far it’s working well with my usual suite of extensions, which extend the software’s functionality.

If anything untoward occurs with the beta, then a bug report will be filed.

Meanwhile, in the boardroom…

Away from coding, news has arrived that elections are to be held soon for the Board of The Document Foundation (TDF), the German-based non-profit organisation behind LibreOffice.

Eleven member of the LibreOffice community are standing as candidates with a joint Pledge (our promise) to the LibreOffice community. It’s not just a positive vision of the future, but includes immediate action points that we can take to fix TDF from the outset.

The eleven are Sophie Gautier, Eliane Domingos, Osvaldo Gervasi, Paolo Vecchi, Jean-Baptiste Faure, Franklin Weng, Daniel Rodriguez, Mike Saunders, me (Andreas Mantke), Jean-François Nifenecker and Enio Gemmo.

The full English text of the Pledge is reproduced below, in addition to which it has been translated into the following languages:
- Dutch;
- French;
- German;
- Bahasa Indonesia;
- Italian;
- Brazilian Portuguese; and
- Spanish.
The Pledge itself reads as follows verbatim:

Our main promises to you

We will bring back tenders.
- We will implement tenders in a way that allows more companies to participate.
- Having only very few and always the same bidders is not sustainable. We will bring a tender process that creates a welcoming environment for all potential bidders. We will create opportunities for everyone, from single developers to large organisations.
- We will hear the valuable input from the Engineering Steering Committee on the important projects and will make them a reality.
- We will work together with the valuable companies from the ecosystem, existing and new ones. Together we will achieve something good for LibreOffice and for everyone involved.
We will be an open and transparent board from day one. We are accountable to all of you. We will not act as a closed group.
- We will have no private board meetings, unless it is absolutely necessary. With very little room for exceptions, there will be only public meetings with a proper agenda and proper minutes that we share in time.
- Board meetings will be at different times. We want that all community members have a chance to join, especially those who cannot participate during working hours.
- There will be fewer, but much more effective meetings. We will focus on strategy, not on day-to-day micromanagement. Meetings every two weeks hardly work for volunteers. A lot more responsibility for everyday business can be laid in the hands of the team.
- We promise monthly public status reports to show what the board is working on. They will be translated into many languages. We encourage and take feedback from the worldwide community to the heart. You are experts in your fields and we listen to you.
- We will install a liquid democracy system as proper tooling for direct community participation in the foundation’s decisions.
We will break the language barriers. English is not a requirement to participate any more.
- We will make sure agenda and minutes for board meetings will be translated into many languages.
- If English is used, we will use “simple plain English”, so more people can understand.
- We promise monthly public calls with the native language community. We want to hear from you and support your activities.
- For these calls, we will ask community members to help with live translation, so all community members can participate.
- We will host at least one of the next two official LibreOffice Conferences out of Europe, e.g. in South America or Asia.
We will value all contributors equally.
- Developers and non-developers, volunteers, company employees and TDF’s team, we are all one, respectable community.
- Nobody should be discriminated for their role. Nobody should be scared to speak out in public.
- We will credit contributors publicly.
- Nobody should feel like “second class” community members any more.
We also promise you this

We will make TDF recognized.
- We will work hard to have TDF be recognized worldwide at governmental level and within the European Union. We will start to actively contact them as a non-profit foundation.
- As one of the leading foundations, TDF must “sit at the table” in standards bodies and when important legislative decisions are taken. We must be seen as a trustworthy reference point of contact for office productivity.
We will actively grow the ecosystem.
- We will create incentives for current and new companies working with LibreOffice.
- We will support them to enter the market.
- Our goal is to have at least two independent companies joining the market in the next two years and many new products based on LibreOffice Technology.
- We will not only aim at direct code contributions, but also ease of use, accessibility and documentation. There will be many more companies that can bid on tenders for work that was underloved for some time.
- We will evaluate the hiring of an independent business partner manager, with a proper mission to achieve this goal and be accountable.
- We will work with the ecosystem on solutions for online and mobile versions of LibreOffice, that benefit both the companies and the community.
We will make development more fun and support our fantastic developer community.
- We will support the community to organize more Hackfests again, ideally in different countries.
- We will offer the developer community to evaluate new and more modern development tools that could make hacking on LibreOffice more exciting and more fun. We will let the developers independently voice what is best for LibreOffice and we are committed to invest in areas important for our developer community.
- We will evaluate to hire one or more developers to fix the most reported bugs from the community and grow the code contributions from the foundation itself. This makes us a better free software and open source citizen.
- We will develop a strategic development plan for the next 24 months, with measurable goals and milestones.
- We will seek funding to implement, directly or through partners, features and improvements that would make a difference to many people and uses.
How we will achieve our goals

Promises are easy to make. Here is our plan how to make them a reality:

Legal issues have been in the way for several years now. If we work together with shared goals in mind, seriously take into account our legal counsels’ advise, we can very soon focus again on actual and important projects that are not getting done right now, because too much time is spent with fights and discussions.

We have experts in many fields in our community, in the companies and in our team – let’s source their knowledge and their passion for LibreOffice! We will encourage everyone to speak out, contribute their knowledge and bring in their unique skills and talent. We will work with trust, respect and mutual appreciation, to achieve the best for TDF.

Good ideas need space to develop and unfold. Only then we can bring the office suite to a new threshold of effectiveness, user friendliness and only then we can evaluate new technologies for incorporation into LibreOffice.

We will also encourage everyone to work much more with other free and open source communities or civil society organizations, to widen their horizon, contribute something good to the world and also learn what challenges others face and how they deal with them.

Conflicts of Interest

One of the main challenges in the past board term was conflict of interest. We don’t want endless discussions, we will implement the solution.

Some of us are members of the team and get paid by TDF, others are working for companies that make business with LibreOffice. We know that there is no difficulty left if people with conflicts of interest are barred from being near decision making. And therefore we hereby promise and guarantee that we will keep out of all decisions and also discussions that could affect our own personal interests, and that we will declare these interests regularly.

Board members who are also team members will work on board matters in their spare time. All board members will follow the existing conflict of interest policy and keep out from any discussion and any decision that could create a conflict of interest for them.

Our goal is to “prevent possible conflicts of interest within the foundation” as laid down in the statutes and set a standard to follow.

The Document Foundation has been built by the community, for the community. We are members of the community who want to run for the next election of the board, to bring TDF back to its golden times – with a happy community, working together creatively, inspiring each other, where everyone has a place to contribute to our common goal.
Bristolian bike

08/12/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language

Spotted this morning in Easton, BS5.

Babber is Bristolian dialect for baby, as well as a general term of endearment, as in “How bist, my babber“.

Furthermore, just like bor (boy) in Norfolk dialect, babbers in Bristol can be any age from zero years upwards.
Bizarre feudal remnants

24/11/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

News arrived today of a bizarre feudal remnant – one used by a human bizarre feudal remnant line his own already well-stuffed pockets.

The human bizarre feudal remnant is none other than Mr Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor, alleged to be the head of state of the English Empire (which some still call the United Kingdom. Ed.), who generally masquerades under the alias of “King” Charles III.

Today’s Guardian reveals that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor is stealing the estates of people who die intestate – i.e. without leaving a will – or with no known relatives in the territory of the Duchy of Lancaster, which consists of consists of 18,433 hectares of land holdings, including rural estates and farmland, urban developments, historic buildings, and commercial properties across England and Wales, particularly in Cheshire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire and the Savoy Estate in London. Its principal purpose of the estate is to provide a source of independent income for Mr Mountbatten-Windsor and his heirs and successors.

This theft of other people’s assets is covered by the legal term ‘bona vacantia‘, meaning unowned property. The same practice of ‘bona vacantia‘ is employed by the Duchy of Cornwall to provide an income for the so-called ‘Prince’ of Wales, one William Arthur Philip Louis Mountbatten-Windsor.

The rich and powerful of this backward medieval country have been stealing the assets owned or used by others for centuries. From 1604 onwards the Inclosure Acts created legal property rights for the rich to land previously held in common in England and Wales, particularly open fields and common land. Between 1604 and 1914 over 5,200 individual acts enclosing public land were passed, affecting 28,000 km².

These thefts of common land were commemorated in a popular poem in the early 18th century.

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own,
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

This practice of appropriating land owned and used by others reached its zenith during Britain’s colonial expansion under the concept of ‘terra nullius‘, literally nobody’s land. How could allegedly primitive people claim ownership of land when nothing concerning property rights was written down, was the flawed logic behind these seizures, which reached their height in Australia, where people now commemorated by street names and public artworks were responsible for the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous people, who have no public monuments by which to remember the victims. This was documented in all its brutality by the three part 2022 TV series The Australian Wars.

Anyway, back from nobody’s land to nobody’s property in the north of England. The Guardian has found out that the Duchy of Lancaster has been secretly using the bona vacantia funds to renovate properties owned by the alleged king and rented out for profit. The Duchy’s accounts suggest it has collected £61.8m in bona vacantia funds over the last decade. Of those, only £9.3m or 15% of the total has gone to charities, which the Duchy maintains is the main reason for collecting the funds.

Needless to say, this news has not gone down well in areas subject to the Duchy of Lancaster’s writ.

Andy Burnham, mayor of Greater Manchester is on record as saying:

I think many people in the north-west will be surprised to learn that the savings and assets of friends and neighbours are being taken in this way. I don’t recall this archaic system ever being explained to anyone here nor public consent for it being given.

Burnham furthermore added that:

This appears to be a bizarre remnant of feudal Britain. While we await the public acts of levelling up that we have been promised, it seems this country still has silent mechanisms of levelling down at work, redistributing wealth in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, friends of some of those whose assets have been stolen have described their use to fix up Duchy properties for future rental as ‘unethical, ‘shocking and ‘a disgrace.

The worst decision this country ever made was to readmit Charles Stuart (son of the late tyrant) in 1660. That would have avoided any future regal robbery of people’s property either in this country or around the world.
Bristol City Council & the English Language

16/11/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

Bristolian may exist as a dialect with its own idiosyncrasies, but within the city and county of Bristol itself, there’s one place where English is used in a peculiar way: the Counts Louse (as pronounced in the local vernacular; some call it City Hall – or a variant thereof – after its renaming by the then Mayor George Ferguson in 2012. Ed.). In his 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote the following:

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Down at the Counts Louse, the English language has been used to conceal what is really going on behind its mock Georgian façade, particularly where funding cuts and redundancies are planned, usually couched in terms such as redeployment, restructuring and the like.
Perhaps the most famous use of such obfuscatory language occurred in 2013 when it was discovered – as reported by The Bristolian – that £165,000 in cash was missing from the council’s loss-making markets department (a department that’s supposed to make money for the local authority. Ed.). This was duly recorded in an internal report as ‘material income misappropriation‘.
We ordinary mortals have a much more succinct phrase than material income misappropriation. We call it theft.

That infamous bit of council-speak has now been joined by another phrase by Councillor Craig Cheney, the elected member in charge of the city’s purse strings, which was duly reported by the Bristol Post in relation to the evacuation of Barton House in Barton Hill due to structural defects.

Barton House. Image courtesy of Google Street View.

What Cllr. Cheney said to the local press while commenting on Barton House included the sentence below.

There’s perhaps not as much concrete as there should be.

Perhaps? Most definitely not as much concrete, plus ignorance and non-observance of the building plans, according to your colleague Councillor Kye Dudd.

Give yourself a pat on the back, Cllr. Cheney; that one sentence alone deserves its own special place in the annals of British understatement. 😀
In less light-hearted reporting on Barton House, it has now emerged that the government warned Bristol City Council in 2017 – six years ago – about the condition of Barton House and four other tower blocks built using the LPS building system and perhaps more scandalously that no structural survey of Barton House had been conducted since 1970, i.e. over half a century ago. Municipal neglect of the city’s infrastructure is endemic down the Counts Louse. 🙁
Lookalikes – Eric and Leonardo

15/11/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

Newsweek in the United States reports that Eric Trump’s recent comment comparing his family’s assets to the Mona Lisa amid their ongoing civil fraud trial in New York has spawned a wave of mockery across social media.

Disgraced former president Donald John Trump and his three adult children – Ivanka, Donald Jr. and the aforementioned Eric are accused of frequently inflating The Donald’s own net worth and the value of his assets by billions of dollars from 2011 to 2021 to secure better deals and loans. Trump and his children have dismissed the accusations and maintained their innocence, accusing prosecutors of being politically motivated and attempting to harm the Dunning-Kruger effect’s candidate’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Earlier this week Eric Trump – hardly one of the world’s towering intellects – claimed that the Trump family properties at play in the civil fraud trial are “worth a fortune” and called them “Mona Lisas of the real estate world.“

Below in true Private Eye style, the Trump Tower in New York and Leonardo’s famous painting are placed side by side, so readers can draw their own conclusions as to which of them are of greater value to the human race as a whole.

Meanwhile, in the boardroom…

Our main promises to you

We also promise you this

How we will achieve our goals

Conflicts of Interest

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