One wonders why governments around the world are not at all keen in eradicating the scourge of the ultra-rich, whom the planet can ill afford to accommodate. Just look at the emissions from their private jets, let alone the dubious company they keep (e.g. the inauguration of the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump) and their attempts to buy elections.
One can only hope that any passing politicians will absorb and act on this valuable health advice.
Later today, the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, is due to land in Scotland for a bit of recreational cheating – assumed to be of the golfing rather than the extra-marital kind – at his two resorts of Turnberry on the Ayrshire coast and Menie in Aberdeenshire (“Twinned with Epstein Island”) in a break from his mission to Make America Grate Again (or something similar. Ed.).
Scotland’s The National has of course, put the news on its front page, but does not stoop to the sycophancy that The Donald craves and has come to expect.
The only people your ‘umble scribe has noted are actually looking forward to The Felon’s visit are the Scottish First Minister John Swinney and the alleged Prime Minister of the Untied Kingdom, one ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, both of whom have arranged to hold meetings with tRump during his Scottish sojourn.
Meanwhile the Scots are planning a traditional warm welcome – hopefully carrying the force of emotion of the late Janey Godley.
Some consumer clickbait from yesterday’s Bristol ‘Live’, a Reach plc local news title.
Articles for the same product also appeared in other Reach plc titles such as the Manchester Evening News and Birmingham ‘Live’, although their readers were not informed that curvaceousness comes in four colours, as were the good burghers of Bristol.
The reason for this is because the headline writers on those papers can recognise ambiguity, unlike those at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.
More years ago than he cares to remember, your ‘umble scribe was asked by one of his local ward councillors (now retired) to come up with a hashtag to publicise our fight against grime – litter, fly-tipping. fly-posting and other environmental crimes – in Bristol’s inner city wards of Easton and Lawrence Hill.
And so #TidyBS5 was born.
Well over a decade later, it’s very encouraging to see others using it, as per this mattress currently gracing St Mark’s Grove.
After Mandarin Chinese and Castilian Spanish, English is the third most spoken native language in the world today, as well as the world’s most widely learned second language, according to Wikipedia.
How it reached that position is a long and complicated story which has been reduced to a 22 minutes’ historical romp by the excellent Rob Words on YouTube.
Rob’s story of English from its earliest origins to the present day starts a long way from the shores of present-day England or even the eastern shores of the North Sea of what is now Frisia, northern Germany and Denmark where most of the origin stories for English start.
No, Rob starts in Asia around the shores and land between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea where it is believed the original ancestral language of English began, before moving both west and east to become the ancestors of the modern European languages and those of the Indian sub-continent based upon Sanskrit, the so-called Indo-European languages. For want of an actual name that has survived down the centuries, this ancestral language is referred to as Proto-Indo-European.
On the move westwards, the branch of Proto-Indo-European from which English developed is known as Proto-Germanic, which predated not just English and German, but also Dutch, Frisian and the Nordic/Scandinavian languages, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.
The story of English on the island of Britain actually begins in the 5th century after the departure of the Romans and mercenaries from across the North Sea who eventually settled are involved.
The influences of subsequent invasions – such as the Vikings and William the Invader‘s wine-drinking, Francophone former Norse marauders are also noted, as are the roles of Shakespeare, Caxton‘s printing press (especially Chancery standard English. Ed.) are all covered as is the effect on English of England’s/Britain’s role in invasion, conquest and colonisation since the mid-sixteenth century.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the video as much as me; and learn something too, which I definitely did.
The dictionary definition of ambiguity is “the fact of something having more than one possible meaning and therefore possibly causing confusion“.
Any sensible person would therefore believe that ambiguity has no place in a newspaper headline.
However, newspapers are not written nowadays by sensible people: or so it would seem.
This is exacerbated by the modern media practice of trying to cram the entire story into the headline in a condensed form, as shown by the screenshot below of this piece from the Daily Post, a title in the Reach plc stable which serves the north of Cymru.
For the benefit of passing illiterate Reach ‘journalists’, an unambiguous version of the headline would read “Prisoner with smiley face tattoo and links to North Wales on run”.
It has since been rumoured that the smiley face tattoo has been recaptured by police. 😉
