Seen in The Galleries, Bristol.
Bristols (noun, plural): English rhyming slang for breasts.
Bristol’s (possessive): from, of or pertaining to Bristol, a city in the west of England.
There’s obviously an apostrophe thief abroad in central Bristol. Could it be a greengrocer looking for fresh supplies (posts passim)? š
Spotted in Day’s Road, The Dings, Bristol.
Subvertising (noun), a portmanteau of subvert and advertising.
Definition: The practice of making parodies of corporate and political advertisements in order to make an ironic statement.
Oxymoron (noun), (plural) -mora.
Definition: (rhetoric) an epigrammatic effect, by which contradictory terms are used in conjunction.
The latest French anti-radicalisation publicity in the wake of France’s recent mass murders (posts passim) at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a Parisian kosher supermarket has now been released.
Yesterday, the Law Gazette website reported that 3 years into its courts and tribunals interpreting contract with the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), Capita Translation & Interpreting has yet to meet its key performance target – that of the percentage of requests filled for the provision of court interpreters.
According to the latest figures released by the MoJ, Capita Translation & Interpreting completed 94.8% of requests for language services in the 3rd quarter (July to September) of 2014, i.e. well short of the 98% target specified in its contract.
The Ministry of Justice said this was the hapless outsourcer’s highest success rate since the contract started in 2012.
Capita Translation & Interpreting is supposed to hit that 98% target every month and has yet to meet it at all in one single month over the last 3 years.
There’s a phrase for this: abject failure.
However, the MoJ seems to have a particular blind spot for its pet contractor’s pathetic performance. Courts minister Shailesh Vara said the interpreting contract had continued to deliver significant improvements since being introduced to tackle inefficiencies and inconsistencies (my weasel words detector is working overtime. Ed.).
Others involved in the administration of justice differ radically from the MoJ stance.
The Law Society said it was “shocking” that after nearly 3 years of the MoJ having a sole provider, the service was still failing to reach its performance target.
“A lack of available interpreters costs time and causes unnecessary adjournments, resulting in avoidable distress to victims and inconvenience to witnesses,” the Society said.
Furthermore, Shadow justice minister Andy Slaughter said it was shocking the government was unable to get a grip after three years into the contract.
I cannot disagree with either the Law Society or Mr. Slaughter. Had my failure to meet targets been of the order of that of Capita Translation & Interpreting, I would not have survived the last quarter of a century as a freelance linguist and been consigned to the dole queue long since.
You should seriously think of showing Capita T&I the door, MoJ. If they haven’t been up to the job for the last 3 years, what makes you think they’ll ever change?
There’s been a lot of coverage in the media recently on the falling price of crude oil – and consequently of petroleum products – but it is questionable whether any other coverage has attained the level of religious fervour exhibited by the Bristol Post, an organ not normally renowned for its piety.
Yesterday’s Post featured a report with the headline Unleaded petrol drops below £1 in Swindon – but when will Bristol see the hallowed price?
Yes, that’s right – hallowed.
According to Collins English Dictionary, the adjective hallowed has the following meanings:
1. set apart as sacred
2. consecrated or holy
Nowhere else have I encountered the price of petrol being referred to as being set apart as sacred, let alone consecrated or holy.
Collins also adds helpfully that hallowed is used to describe something that is respected and admired, usually because it is old, important, or has a good reputation.
I hardly think any of the adjectives so helpfully added by Collins could be applied – even in the broadest sense – to the price of petrol in the West Country.
Could it be that the unnamed journalist responsible for the piece is ignorant of the meaning of hallowed?
Quite possibly.
Furthermore, the Bristol Post is well known locally for its unquestioning championing of the motorist and demonisation of cyclists, not to mention its barely concealed opposition to Bristol Mayor George Ferguson’s plans for residents’ parking zones. That being so, perhaps Post “journalists” do worship piously at the pumps every time they fill up. š
When Wikipedia came online in January 2001, no-one could have have imagined its subsequent development. Fourteen years later, innumerable authors have produced more than 34 million articles in 280 languages. The Wikimedia Foundation attracts 20,000 mn. hits on the online encyclopaedia and its sister projects, heise reports.
This success is now being recognised by the Dutch-based Praemium Erasmianum foundation with the noted Erasmus Prize. Part of the citation reads: “By distributing knowledge to places where it was previously unavailable, Wikipedia also plays an important role in countries where neutrality and open information are not taken for granted. With its worldwide reach and social impact.”
Each year the Praemium Erasmianum foundation recognises people and institutions for their services. The prize will be handed over to representatives of the Wikipedia community in the autumn, while the prize money of €150,000 is to be used for community development.
In the meantime, the Wikimedia Foundation must grapple with future strategy. As Foundation Trustee Phoebe Ayers recently explained on her blog, the online encyclopaedia’s readership has clearly declined, particularly in industrial countries. Even sharply rising mobile access figures cannot compensate for the loss. The number of authors has also been declining steadily for several years. The Wikimedia Foundation is investing in a more attractive platform that’s also easier to use to counteract this trend.
De Volkskrant reports that speakers of Dutch are daily more circumlocutory with many diversions and ’empty elements’ than speakers of languages such as Bantawa, Bininj Gun-Wok, Egyptian Arabic, Samoan, Sandawe, Kharia, Khwarshi, Kayardild, Teiwa, Tidore, Sheko and Sochiapan Chinantec, according to research by graduate researcher Sterre Leufkens of Amsterdam University. A total of 22 languages were scored by Leufkens for the presence of unnecessary grammatical elements and rules. Her dissertation contains several disappointing findings about her mother tongue.
Take the difference between ‘de‘ and ‘het‘. English only has ‘the‘. Under the coconut palms of Samoa in the south Pacific they have know for a long time that life can be easier from a linguistic point of view. Another interesting fact is that when Dutch arrived in southern Africa, ‘de‘ and ‘het‘ melted like Dutch snow in the African sun to make space for the clearer ‘die‘.
Dutch is also long-winded because verbs have a plural form – hij loopt and wij lopen – and due to the double plural endings of substantives: ‘ziektes‘ and ‘ziekten‘, ‘sektes‘ and ‘sekten‘. Dutch has no less than three ways to compose words. In linguistic jargon such peculiarities are known as historical junk.
In Dutch the lumber could have accumulated over the centuries due to the fact that few people made this language their own as a second language. When large groups actually do that it often results in grammatical simplifications. That must have happened some 1,500 ago with the West German dialect from which English is derived.
It still remains to be seen whether Dutch contains more lumber and ballast than German, French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Greek or Armenian. Dutch features as the sole Indo-European language in Leufkens’ research. “The point was to get an initial impression of what is possible in this area,” Leufkens told the magazine Onze Taal. “In that case it is better to take languages that are as far apart as possible.”
A Latvian man spent 4 weeks in jail for an offence that would normally have attracted a non-custodial sentence, the Shropshire Star reports.
Rolands Etjantens pleaded guilty on 8th December to a charge of common assault, but was remanded in custody by Telford magistrates to await assessment by the probation service to see if he was suitable for community punishment.
According to his solicitor, Etjantensā lack of English also meant he was not suitable for unpaid work in the community or supervision by the probation service as both of these would also require the use of interpreters.
District Judge Andrew King ultimately sentenced Etjantens, of no fixed abode, to 42 days in prison, meaning that he would be released within a few days.
There’s a classic homophone in today’s online Bristol Post, which carries a feature on the return of What the Frock!, the city’s all-female comedy night.
The homophone in question is in first sentence of the third paragraph, which at the time of writing reads as follows:
The line-up features extended sets from both Mae Martin and Anna Morris and will be compared by Bristol’s very own Jayde Adams, pictured, winner of the Funny Women 2014 Awards.
Compared? With what? Or whom? š
The word you’re looking for, struggling Post journalist, is compere, whose dictionary definition is:
comĀ·pere
(kÅmā²pĆ¢rā²) Chiefly British
n.
The master of ceremonies, as of a television entertainment program or a variety show.
v. comĀ·pered, comĀ·perĀ·ing, comĀ·peres
v.tr.
To serve as master of ceremonies for.
v.intr.
To serve as the master of ceremonies.
Dinner for One, starring Freddie Frinton and May Warden, is an institution on German television on New Year’s Eve, as well as in Austria and Switzerland.
Dinner for One was originally written as a two-hander comedy sketch for the theatre in the 1920s. Its author was Lauri Wylie.
In 1963 German television station Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) recorded a performance of the piece in the original English with a short introduction in German.
The sketch presents the 90th birthday of elderly upper-class Englishwoman Miss Sophie, who hosts a celebration dinner every year for her friends Mr Pommeroy, Mr Winterbottom, Sir Toby and Admiral von Schneider. However, due to her great age, Miss Sophie has outlived all her friends…