Language

  • Bristol Post Balls – spelling it out

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.

    Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.

    Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.

    screenshot of Bristol Post gallery item

    How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.

    This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.

  • Argentina introduces Huayra Linux

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Politics, Tech

    The Argentine state has developed its own Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux, Germany’s Heise reports. Huayra Linux (the word huayra is from Quechua and means wind) is part of the Conectar Igualdad programme, which is aimed at closing the digital divide in Argentina by equipping schools better. Three million netbooks were handed out to pupils and teachers under this programme between 2010 and 2012. Huayra Linux is an important building block for achieving this programme’s goals since it frees users from reliance on proprietary software suppliers, such as Microsoft.

    Huayra Linux logo

  • Language row over new Belgian national stadium

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    A dispute has broken out in Belgium over the language to be used in the new national stadium just one day after agreement was finally reached to build it, Reuters reported at the end of last week.

    The planned 60,000 capacity stadium will be the centrepiece of Brussels’ bid to host matches during the 2020 European football championships and replace the current 45,000 seat King Baudouin Stadium (formerly known as the Heysel Stadium).

    The venues are only about 1 kilometre apart, but while the King Baudouin Stadium is in Brussels (which is officially bilingual but largely French-speaking), its planned successor is in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.

    Flemish politicians are indignant of Brussels extending its francophone to Flanders. Flemish Sports Minister Philippe Muyters has stated that language rules must be respected.

    “One of the underlying elements should be an agreement on the use of Dutch there,” said Muyters on a television programme last Wednesday.

    Language is a frequent source of controversy in Belgium. The 6.23 mn. Flemish majority fiercely protects its Dutch language and culture and is constantly alert to encroachments by French speakers, who comprise some 3.32 mn. of the Belgian population.

  • Made redundant? No, I was ‘catalyzed’

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics, Social Media

    For decades, managers have been trying to come up with anodyne terms for dismissing people and making them redundant.

    Some of the more common ones are: give someone their notice, get rid of, discharge, terminate; lay off; sack, give someone the sack, fire, boot out, give someone the boot, give someone their marching orders, show someone the door, can, pink-slip; cashier.

    Following this trend, bosses at Bristol City Council have now come up with another, ‘to catalyze’, as evidenced by a mole down the Counts Louse (since renamed ‘City Hall’ by Mayor Red Trousers (posts passim). Ed.) who tweeted the following yesterday.

    screenshot of BCCDisgruntled tweet

    I’m sure all employees of the council are reassured that the management has their best interests at heart by not wanting to hurt their feelings as they’re unceremoniously handed their P45s and shown the door.

  • Bristol Post Balls – is the paper now written by greengrocer’s?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The greengrocers’ – or superfluous – apostrophe has a special place if one’s selling bananas (shouldn’t that be banana’s? Ed.), but it looks sadly out of place in Bristol’s newspaper of record, which is what happened yesterday in this heartening story from the St George area of the city.

    The offending punctuation even had the temerity to turn up in the item’s opening sentence, as follows:

    Crofts End Church in St George has just opened the doors to it’s newly refurbished internet suite.

    No doubt the bosses at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth believe the downward spiral in quality is a small price to pay for what they’re saving by not employing sub-editors.

  • Absent interpreters delay 642 court cases in 2012

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    image of gilded statue of Justice on top of Old BaileyThe Independent reports today that more than 500 court cases are being thrown out or delayed each week due to failings by prosecutors or in the court system.

    Government figures reveal that a total 106,859 cases before crown and magistrates’ courts were dropped or delayed in 2012, costing the public purse an estimated £17.4 mn.

    Of this total the absence of an interpreter was responsible for delays to 642 cases in the year in question.

    No doubt Helen Grant MP and her colleagues at the Ministry of Justice will attribute these interpreter absences as “teething troubles” with its contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, rather than a sign of the latter’s total incompetence and yet more evidence that it was wrong to fiddle with the previous arrangements with interpreting services for courts and tribunals in the first place.

  • Running normally?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media

    Have you ever wondered why your train is running late?

    The National Rail Enquiries Twitter feed is very useful for providing answers, as per the typical tweet below.

    screenshot of National Rail Enquiries running normally tweet

    I can hear those of you with an acute sense of English already asking whether “running normally” on the UK rail network usually involves “following a broken down train” (because that’s what travelling by rail normally feels like? Ed.). 😉

  • YLAL: interpreting outsourcing a lesson for legal aid changes

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    YLAL logoThere’s a debate on criminal legal aid reforms and price competitive tendering taking place in Westminster Hall on 4 September 2013. The debate has been secured by Labour’s Karl Turner MP and will centre on the Ministry of Justice’s proposed changes to criminal legal aid contained in the consultation paper “Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a More Credible and Efficient System”.

    Ahead of the debate, Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL), a 2,000-strong group of lawyers committed to practising in areas of law traditionally funded by legal aid, has very helpfully prepared a briefing note (PDF) ahead of this debate.

    The briefing note is not very complementary about the MoJ’s experience with the outsourcing of interpreting services for courts and tribunals to ALS/Capita T&I (posts passim) and makes the following point about this ongoing fiasco.

    Short term “savings” cannot justify the long term cost to the justice system, one which Mr Grayling is correct to describe as “a justice system of which we can be proud and which justly deserves its world-wide recognition for impartiality and fairness”. We should learn the lessons of outsourcing to the lowest bidder and how this leads to the state picking up the tab when providers fail to deliver, for example, the contracting of interpreting services for the court and tribunal system.

    What’s the betting Justice Minister ‘Failing’ Grayling – the first non-lawyer to be appointed Lord Chancellor since 1673 – completely ignores all advice and pushes ahead regardless with his disastrous plans?

  • Bristol Post Balls – headline news

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    This blog has before drawn attention to the difficulty of devising an apposite newspaper headline (posts passim).

    No such troubles beset the Bristol Post as shown by the following headlines from today’s News section of the online version.

    screenshot of Bristol Post
    Read all about it! Click on image for the full-sized version.

    One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?

    Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂

    Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:

    I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.

Posts navigation