Language | Steve Woods

Shropshire Star exclusive: donkey has waist

29/10/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities
The Shropshire Star is a local newspaper serving the county where your ‘umble scribe was born. However, its role in the field of science – and the discipline of asinine anatomy in particular – has not previously been recognised.

Until now, that is.

On Friday the Star carried a report of a donkey with its back legs and rear stuck in a storm drain somewhere undisclosed in the vicinity of Market Drayton, your correspondent’s home town.

The incident was attended by crews from Market Drayton, Telford Central and Wellington fire stations, who were able to extract the donkey called Amigo from the drain.

The Star was so pleased with its contribution to asinine anatomy and veterinary science that it incorporated it into its headline: Firefighters rush to rescue donkey stuck waist-deep in storm drain,

Here’s a donkey. Spot the waist.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

There are two dictionary definitions of waist, one pertaining to anatomy, the other to apparel. Neither mentions donkeys:
- the part of the body above and slightly narrower than the hips; and
- the part of a piece of clothing that goes around or covers the area between the hips and the ribs.
The Guardian also covered the story. Curiously, its account fails to mention Amigo’s waist. 😀
Cancelled show moved to imaginary Shropshire town

21/10/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

One of the cultural jewels of Market Drayton – the town where your ‘umble scribe grew up – is the Festival Drayton Centre. However, in those days it was Frogmore Road Primitive Methodist chapel, a venue where my late mother took to the pulpit as a lay preacher when I was a child.

Last Thursday Iranian-British comedian and actor Omid Djalili pulled out of a show at the Centre due to “personal threats due to the situation in Israel“, as reported by the BBC.

The BBC did manage to get the essentials of the story correct. However, one significant national news outlet did not.

Step forward The Independent, once a decent broadsheet newspaper that refused to publish trivia about the so-called royal family, but now sadly reduced to a badly researched news website with irritating properties and mediocre content.

In its rendition of the story, The Independent wrote as follows:

On Thursday (19 October), Djalili was scheduled to perform at the Festival Drayton Centre in West Drayton, Shropshire. However, the show was pulled hours before its scheduled opening due to safety concerns for the star.

No gazetteer of Shropshire features such a place as West Drayton. Whilst Market Drayton itself consists of two parishes – Drayton in Hales and Little Drayton (also known as Drayton Parva. Ed.), but of an occidental Drayton, there’s not a sign.

Within the polluting embrace of London’s M25 orbital car park there is the London suburb of West Drayton, whilst another village of the same name exists in Nottinghamshire.

Your correspondent notes that the Independent piece was written by a ‘culture reporter and reviewer‘ writing mostly for titles based within that there London, so perhaps the geographical ignorance can be excused. 🙂
Commission fires warning shot across Musk’s bows

13/10/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media, Tech
The EU Commission has announced it has sent a request for information to social media site X, formerly known as Twitter, under the Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA). It follows indications of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech. Furthermore, the request also concerns compliance with other provisions of the DSA

The Commission reports it is investigating X’s compliance with the DSA, including the following:
- Policies and practices regarding notices on illegal content;
- Complaint handling; and
- Risk assessment measures to mitigate the risks identified.
X needs to provide the requested information to the Commission by 18 October 2023 for questions related to the activation and functioning of X’s crisis response protocol and by 31 October 2023 on the rest. Based on the assessment of the replies, the Commission will assess next steps. This could entail the formal opening of proceedings under Article 66 of the DSA.

The Commission can impose fines for incorrect, incomplete or misleading information in response to a request for information under Article 74 (2) of the DSA. If X does not reply, the Commission may decide to request the information by decision. In this case, failure to reply by the deadline could lead to the imposition of period penalties.

Your ‘umble scribe believes that the platform owner’s normal response to those he does not like – a turd emoji – will not placate the inhabitants of the Berlaymont building in Brussels (posts passim).
Free Software video now in 12 languages

10/10/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech

Over the last few weeks the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) has been running a fundraising campaign to translate its “What is Free Software” video into more European languages. The FSFE’s Ana Galán writes: “Tanks to your contributions, it is now available in 12 languages! Albanian*, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish! You can find them all at https://media.fsfe.org/w/p/9gYSyoEYggsqBExLWjRejL“.

In the next few months these videos will help the FSFE’s volunteers to reach out to their local candidates for the European Parliament and advocate the adoption of free software, explaining them why it is important and making politicians aware of the benefits of Software Freedom for society.

* = To be released shortly
City rejoins Gloucestershire – Bristol Live exclusive

29/09/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

One time long ago there was a county called Gloucestershire. It was a large county that included the city of Bristol as one of its major centres of population. However, that all changed in 1373 when Bristol was granted county status in its own right by the king through the usual expedient of paying him a sufficiently large quantity of cash.

However, that has now all changed and Bristol is once again in the embrace of Gloucestershire, even though the news has been suppressed and can only be found by a creful reading of the Bristol Live website, where it appears in a piece by Emma Flanagan inviting readers to vote for their favourite Chinese takeaways.

The headline to the article asks Where can you get the best Chinese takeaway in Bristol?. There’s no mention there about the city being returned to its former historical county 650 years after making its escape from the clutches of the county that grew up based on the old Roman settlement of Glevum.
The clue to Bristol returning to Gloucestershire is well concealed, hiding in the photo caption near the top of piece; it reads Tell us the best Chinese takeaway in Gloucestershire and we’ll crown a winner.

Will this mean a change in the city’s extortionate rate of council tax? Better public services? Improved public transport? Not a word mentioned.

No corresponding article asking readers to rate Chinese takeaways in Bristol has been found on Bristol Live’s sister title, Gloucestershire Live (so far. Ed.), so this dreadful piece of copy has not been shared with other Reach publications.

Moving Bristol to Gloucestershire was not the only inaccuracy of the geographical kind appearing on the Bristol Live website today. By some strange alteration in geophysical forces, the city has been moved from nestling on the banks of the Bristol Avon to those of the mighty Severn/Hafren, as per the screenshot below.

Since this morning the text of the headline has now been changed to read Five-star Severn Bore live as ‘the greatest ride on earth’ rolls through West Country.

If the Bristol Live website ever had a corrections and clarifications column, it would be several times larger than the paper’s website! 😀
Happy birthday GNU!

26/09/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Tech
Tomorrow, 27th September, marks the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the GNU Project, without which there would be no free software (which some also call open source. Ed.) and no GNU/Linux operating system, which is quite often abbreviated to just Linux.

Four decades ago, technology began to shape our lives: it was the early 1980s, computers did not yet fit into our pockets but filled large rooms, as they had done in the mid-1970s, when your ‘umble scribe took a module called Computer Appreciation as part of his polytechnic modern languages degree (no Molière and Goethe for us! Ed.). In 1982, the Time magazine named the computer as its “Person of the Year“. About this time, point, some people had already started pointing out the need to give users control over this technology. So in 1983 the GNU Project was announced by Richard Stallman. The project’s aim was to create an operating system consisting entirely of free software to allow people to use, understand, adapt and share software. Two years later the Free Software Foundation was established as the legal backbone for the GNU project.

Today the free software movement is a broad global movement encompassing small local companies, worldwide corporations, civil society organisations and thousands of professionals, who are working towards a world where the four freedoms are guaranteed:
- The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0);
- The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this;
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2); and
- The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
These rights go hand in hand with other fundamental rights such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press and privacy.

In 1992, the essential components of the GNU operating system were complete, except for one, the kernel. When the Linux kernel was released under the GNU GPL in 1992, the combination of GNU and Linux formed a complete free operating system – GNU/Linux system as we know it today.

The GPL pioneered the concept of “copyleft” – as opposed to copyright. Stallman envisaged this as a means of preventing GNU from ever becoming proprietary software (like all those expensive Microsoft products. Ed.) This does not exclude free S#software from being sold, as long as the buyers are not restricted from exercising the above-mentioned four rights after purchase. Free Software can also be commercialised in other ways, e.g. by selling support, services or certification.

Today GNU/Linux forms the backbone of the Internet and powers millions of servers and desktops, as well embedded computing devices, whilst software has become an indispensable resource for the modern world

How did the name GNU come about? It’s an acronym for GNU’s not Unix, as the original idea was to create a clone of Unix – a proprietary operating system – but containing no proprietary code. That makes GNU a recursive acronym, i.e. an acronym that refers to itself.

Happy 40th birthday, GNU!
Boat for sale – suitable project for DIY enthusiast

06/09/2023 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

When your correspondent was enjoying a pint at a quayside pub down Bristol’s city docks (which some call the ‘Harbourside’. Ed.) some years ago, the subject of boats came up somehow, along with a fine adage, i.e. “a boat is a hole in the water into which you shovel money“.

Yesterday in on the banks of the Avon in Bath, quite near the railway station, your ‘umble scribe came across evidence of what happens when one stops shovelling money into that hole in the water…

For sale – needs some attention
Syndicated bad English

06/09/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

Local news titles owned by Reach plc, which also owns the Daily Mirror and Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.) frequently share stories so frequently that anyone would think either that slow news days were commonplace or that the the country’s major cities had annexed vast swathes of territory well removed from their location.

An example of this practice occurred earlier this week in the Bristol Post, supposedly the city’s (former) newspaper of record, as per the following screenshot.

Last time your ‘umble scribe looked, Fowey in Cornwall was not – and has no intentions of being – a suburb of Bristol. The entire story has been copied and pasted en bloc from Cornwall Live, a sister title to the Bristol Post/Live, including a glaring spelling error – busses – in both the headline and the copy.

That spelling error is one that should have been eradicated in primary school, not allowed to persist into the professional life of an alleged ‘journalist‘.

Your correspondent recalls talking to a former sub-editor some years ago, who was then lecturing at the University of the West of England, teaching online journalism to media studies students. He remarked that before before he could start training them in how to report stuff online, he had to teach them basic English first!
2020’s Stollen US presidential election takes the cake

26/08/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

On Thursday the perpetual victim otherwise known as the disgraced 45th President of the United States of America, one Donald John Trump, surrendered to the authorities at Fulton County Jail, Georgia on more than a dozen charges stemming from his efforts to reverse the 2020 election results in that state, brining to four the number of times he has faced criminal charges in 2023.

During his 20 minutes in custody, the Fulton County Sherriff’s Department took the congenital liar’s fingerprints and photograph (aka a mugshot), the latter of which was released and in which the disgraced former commander in cheat shows off his compassionate and humane side to best advantage.

The Donald looking like his mother’s told the toddler him that he cannot have a cookie.

After leaving custody and returning to his perpetual hobby of cheating on the golf course, Trump found time to voice his continual grievances on his own Truth Social [sic] social media platform, griping yet again that the 2020 US presidential election being “RIGGED” (note block capitals. Ed.) and, er, “STOLLEN” (one more note block capitals. Ed.).

Stollen, Mr disgraced former president? According to Wikipedia, “Stollen is a cake-like fruit bread made with yeast, water and flour, and usually with zest added to the dough. Orangeat (candied orange peel) and candied citrus peel (Zitronat), raisins and almonds, and various spices such as cardamom and cinnamon are added. Other ingredients, such as milk, sugar, butter, salt, rum, eggs, vanilla, other dried fruits and nuts and marzipan, may also be added to the dough. Except for the fruit added, the dough is quite low in sugar. The finished bread is sprinkled with icing sugar.”.

Stollen. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It has yet to be determined by the courts whether a German Christmas speciality is less of a threat to the constitutional integrity of the United States of America than its 45th head of state and his credulous supporters.

If it did come to a vote and your ‘umble scribe was enfranchised, he would always vote for a German Christmas than someone who can’t even be honest when he plays golf.
Daily Brexit – crime against syntax

23/08/2023 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics

As a title in the Reach plc newspaper stable, the Daily Brexit (which some still call the Express. Ed.) has long inhabited an alternative reality, a world where the economic disaster otherwise known as Brexit is a roaring success (e.g. ‘Global Britain is thriving’).

In recent times the title has gained a reputation more of right-wing posturing than for the factual reporting of news and current affairs

A new charge must now be added to the title’s many crimes against reality and journalism – a crime against English, as seen in the headline below posted today on the paper’s website in its continuing campaign of hate against Harry Mountbatten-Windsor and his wife.

Wouldn’t it be a boon to journalism if those who write for the fourth estate – even on trivial, gossipy matters – had a basic level of competence in the language in which they are writing?

Your comments would be welcome below.

PS: for any passing illiterate Reach plc hacks in search of enlightenment, the grammatically correct version of the headline would read: “Harry’s six word response as to why he and Meghan won’t give up titles“.

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