Social Media | Steve Woods

The importance of proofreading

17/04/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

Within minutes of each other, two occurrences reminded your ‘umble scribe of the importance of proofreading, i.e. the process of finding and correcting mistakes in text before it is printed out or posted online.

If nothing else, it proves the person or company involves knows what it’s doing and writing, providing evidence of professional competence

The first was spotted on a change machine in Terminal 1 of Manchester Airport in the early hours of this morning.

SPECIMAN? What’s one of those?

According to Wikipedia, a specimen – not SPECIMAN – banknote is printed generally in very limited quantities for distribution to central banks to aid in the recognition of banknotes from a country other than their own. Furthermore, To avoid use of specimen banknotes as legal tender notes, the banknotes are deformed, typically by being overprinted and/or punched (perfin) with an inscription such as “SPECIMEN”, “SPECIMEN NO VALUE”, “CANCELLED” or the equivalent in one or more other languages.

The second turned up a couple of minutes later on your correspondent’s social media feed.

Should those with a poor grasp of English be gaoled?

A reverse image search reveals that the original image first emerged on social media some 4 years ago and originated in the United States. Note that the snack is accurately defined as having caramelized onion relish its long description. Y’all have a good misspelt sandwich now! 😀
Distracted boyfriend: Tory Lite edition

30/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media
The latest variant of the Distracted boyfriend meme has just come into my social media feed (posts passim).

This time the dramatis personae are:
- Distracted boyfriend – ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, allegedly leader of the democratic socialist (on paper anyway. Ed.) Labour Party;
- Annoyed girlfriend – Clement Attlee, leader of the 1945-51 post-war Labour government, which introduced the National Health Service amongst other achievements; and
- New love interest – one Margaret Hilda Thatcher, one of the Untied Kingdom’s worst prime ministers and figure of divine devotion to the right-wing Conservative Party, the person who inspired the addition to the English language of the noun Thatcherism and the adjective Thatcherite.
Some would say that any similarity between Starmer and a socialist is – as Hollywood would say – purely coincidental; others would even go as far as to declare such to be non-existent.
Greggs – EN-US written here

21/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

In recent days, pastry products purveyor Greggs suffered an IT outage that left shops unable to process certain types of payment, the BBC reported yesterday. The company has over 2,000 branches and employs 21,500 persons.

Some shops were forced to close and posted notices saying they were closed for the day or could only accept certain payment types. Fans of hot pastry-based snacks took to social media, with some labelling it as bordering on a national emergency. One of the more interesting signs from an unidentified branch of Greggs is shown below.

Yes, you did read that correctly: “Due to a system outage, we are CARD ONLY temporarily and our staff cant do math“.

A system outage is not the only woe to beset this particular branch of Greggs. First of all, there’s a punctuation thief about, unless the staff cant is hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature from employees. Secondly, what is this math? Mathematics, the knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes, is abbreviated differently by speakers of British and American English; the former with maths, the latter with math, as in the well-known US phrase, (you) do the math.

Fears of the creeping Americanisation of British English have been doing the rounds for about a century already, but are becoming more prevalent due to the pervasiveness of US culture and a general lack of awareness of the distinctions between the two dialects. For instance, your ‘umble scribe would call something that ran his laptop a program, whilst something broadcast on the radio or TV would be a programme: some folk – quite possibly younger – would use program without distinction for both.
Food and language

15/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

Along with water, food is one of the essentials of life.

Another of life’s essentials is language; it’s vital for communication and communal living in a social species such as ourselves.

One of the elements of language is the adage, generally defined as something which people often say and which expresses a general truth about some aspect of life.

In English one well-known adage is there’s many a true word spoken in jest, a propos of which the screenshot below turned up today in my social media feed.
Distracted boyfriend: fascist edition

11/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media, Tech

According to Wikipedia, “Distracted boyfriend is an Internet meme based on a 2015 stock photograph by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem. Social media users started using the image as a meme at the start of 2017, and it went viral in August 2017 as a way to depict different forms of disloyalty. The meme has inspired various spin-offs and received critical acclaim.”

Copyright on original: Antonio Guillem.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

The latest depiction of such portrayal has taken more than one step to the right, depicting as it does Kremlin crook Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin as the object of distraction, Adolf Hitler as the long-suffering girlfriend and one Donald John Trump, unauthorised keeper of classified documents, convicted business fraudster, convicted sexual predator, suspected Capitol insurrectionist in chief and disgraced forty-fifth president of the United States of America.

Phwoar!
Dire outlook for Tories

07/03/2024 Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media

Yesterday saw Jeremy Hunt, a man who does very poor Chancellor of the Exchequer impression (preceding which he had pretended to be Secretary of State for Health, managing to incur the ire of hospital doctors while in office. Ed.), present his budget to parliament.

Many folk have remarked on social media recently on the similarity between Mr Hunt and Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean sitcom character, so here’s a handy image to see if their affirmations are correct.

Sticking with the same two characters, your ‘umble scribe decided to have some fun yesterday on Mastodon with a poll asking who would make the better finance minister. The unsurprising results are shown below.

And that’s not the end of the bad news for the Blue Team. Another poll in which I participated asked who readers would like to be the next prime minister, giving the options of incumbent Rishi Sunak, Labour leader ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer, the late lamented Groucho Marx, and Larry the Downing Street mouser.

Yes, that’s right Larry the Cat, the Downing Street moggy, beat both professional politicians, as did the runner-up, a Marxist, albeit one from the Groucho wing of the movement.

We are cursed to live in the proverbial interesting times.

Even though Larry resigned from his post under the premiership of disgraced former party-time alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (posts passim), as did lots of other staffers, he soon returned to his old stomping ground during the lettuce shelf life length premiership of the disastrous free marketeer Mary Elizabeth Truss, the free marketeer the markets rejected.
Michelle Donelan does a libel

06/03/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

News has come to light today that Michelle Donelan, the dishonourable member for Chippenham, currently doing a nice sideline in incompetence as the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, has retracted libellous allegations made in October 2023 against Professor Kate Sang of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh – an academic recently appointed to a UKRI advisory group – accusing Prof. Sang of expressing sympathy for proscribed terrorist organisation Hamas. Donelan also made similar defamatory allegations about another academic, Dr Kamna Patel of University College London.

Donelan has now withdrawn her allegations and apologised for the remarks she initially made via social media, as well as agreeing to pay Prof. Sang undisclosed damages and legal cost have been funded by the taxpayer, in the same manner disgraced former party-time Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson had his legal fees funded by the public purse when he was finally pulled up after constantly lying to the House of Commons.

The use of public funds to redress the damage done by a government minister’s private bigotry has not gone down well in some circles, to put it mildly. Those objecting include the Liberal Democrats’ deputy leader Daisy Cooper, who has has referred to the largesse of the public purse in relieving Donelan’s financial embarrassment as nothing short of a national scandal as her actions were clearly outside of her ministerial brief.

However, not all the media presented the audiences with the full facts. Here the BBC has Donelan forking out herself for the damages and legal costs. It was not alone in doing so, with The Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph all implying Donelan is paying the agreed sum out of her own pocket.

Wikipedia helpfully mentions in its article on the minister that before entering politics, Donelan’s career was in marketing, meaning that she has previous form in peddling stuff that is patently untrue or closely related thereto (along with advertising, public relations and broadcasting, marketing is one of the so-called bullshit industries. Ed.).

Calls are now being made for her resignation, but as per usual an anonymous Number 10 source has stated that Rishi Sunak had full confidence in Donelan, calling her “an excellent minister”. The last time I looked, excellent ministers do not commit libel.
Commemorative Carcassonne culinary cock-up

25/02/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Social Media

The French city of Carcassonne in the département of Aude is best known – and rightly so – for its medieval citadel, which actually has a history dating back to the Gallo-Roman period and is on the UNESCO list of World Heritage Sites.

However, in recent days Carcassonne has become equally well known – in the Francophone world at least – for the poor quality of the local council’s spelling and its subsequent mockery on social media and in the mainstream print and broadcast media, as Midi Libre reports.

Like any French town or city, some of Carcassonne’s street names commemorate prominent local and/or national figures.

One of those luminaries so honoured in Carcassonne is the physicist Pierre Curie (1859-1906) In 1903, Pierre was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics along with his wife, Marie Skłodowska–Curie and another French scientist, Henri Becquerel, the man who discovered radioactity, all of them being jointly honoured in that year for their contributions to science and knowledge.

As stated by Midi Libre, the cause for the outbreak of mainstream media and social media mockery, not to mention the presence of red faces at the local mairie, can be summarised in one single sentence.

Cette semaine, deux panneaux ont été installés sur l’avenue Pierre Curie, dans la cité audoise, sauf que le célèbre physicien a été rebaptisé… “Pierre Curry” et a donc été orthographié comme la célèbre épice indienne.

Which is rendered in English as the following:

This week, two road signs were installed on Avenue Pierre Curie, in the city in Aude, except that the famous physicist was renamed… “Pierre Curry” and was thus spelled like the famous Indian spice.

The erroneous signs were quickly removed yesterday (Saturday). The council has stated that signs with the correct spelling will be installed from this coming Monday.

The mockery on social media took two forms: firstly, the culinary (it is not known whether Pierre and Marie invented the radioactive tandoori. Ed.), whilst Jo Zefka provides a typical post mocking the council’s poor orthographical skills.

Zefka asks:

“Avenue Pierre Curry, physicien”.
Demain, la “rue Arthur Rambo, poète” ?

English version:

“Avenue Pierre Curie, physicist”.
Tomorrow, “rue Arthur Rambo, poet”?

Your ‘umble scribe is pleased to note the speed with which Carcassonne town hall will be replacing the error-laden road signs. Here in the fair city and county of Bristol, the council – which is not known for its alacrity (except when pursuing council tax arrears .Ed.) – took all of four years to replace an erroneous road sign reading Morton Road (instead of Morton Street) in Lawrence Hill, perhaps because it lacked to comic cock-up quality of its Carcassonnais counterpart.
MO Republican embraces her inner Nazi

08/02/2024 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media, Uncategorized

Q: what links an anonymous-looking plot of land somewhere in Missouri with Bebelplatz (also known as Opernplatz) in the city of Berlin?

A: The burning of books.

On 10th May 1933 , Nazi supporters from the German Student Association gathered in Bebelplatz to burn books. They burned around 20,000 books, including works by Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein, Erich Kästner and many other authors.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

On 6th February 2024, Valentina Gomez, a Republican Party candidate for Missouri’s Secretary of State (the state’s public officer whose duties include the oversight of elections, running the state library and the preservation of state archives. Ed.), posted a video of herself on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter showing herself using a flame-thrower to destroy 2 LGBTQ-inclusive books, as reported by NBC.

Gomez’s text accompanying the post tells one all that’s needed to know about her extreme right-wing views of the “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition” variety. The books she destroyed were also taken from public libraries in the state, so she is also guilty of vandalism or destroying public property, but as the value of the books is under $750, she’ll probably escape censure under state law.

To return to Bebelplatz, it now contains an artwork by the sculptor Micha Ullman entitled The Empty Library, which was unveiled in May 1995. The memorial is set into the square’s cobblestones and contains a collection of empty subterranean bookcases. A few metres away is a commemorative bronze plaque containing a quotation by the author Heinrich Heine, whose books were amongst those burned.

The quotation reads:

Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort
wo man Bücher verbrennt,
verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.
In English the quotation is equally chilling:
That was but a prelude;
where they burn books,
they will ultimately burn people as well

As to the Nazi link, LGBTQ Nation remarks:

Whether or not Gomez understands the political and moral implications of book burning is unclear. The video could be a savvy and unsubtle reference, like Donald Trump’s use of terms including “vermin” and “poisoning the blood”, to Nazi ideology in an appeal to the most extreme of the MAGA base.

America, history is trying to teach you a lesson. Don’t fall asleep in class or gaze out of the window.
And now, a message about the prime minister…

26/01/2024 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

As seen yesterday on the fringes of Bristol’s Broadmead shopping ‘quarter’.

As it bears no imprint, your correspondent doubts this is official party political campaign material.

However, it is on a par with former Scottish First Minister Nicola Surgeon’s assessment of one of Sunak’s predecessors in the post, namely disgraced former party-time prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

Further less than complementary appraisals of senior Tory politicians, including one comparing lettuce shelf-life prime minister Mary Elizabeth Truss to a marzipan sex toy, were subsequently revealed to be spurious.

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