English usage

  • Hail to(o) the Chief?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Besides his less endearing qualities of bullying, sexism and xenophobia, the 45th President of the United States of America is believed by some not to be very bright either, an opinion which is reinforced by the presence of a glaring typographical error in the text on his official inauguration portrait, which must at some time have passed across his desk for approval (or even been written by him. Ed.).

    Trump official inauguration photo

    Proof readers and the eagle-eyed will no doubt spot it immediately, unlike POTUS did.

    However, orthography and proof reading may be the least of President Typo’s worries at present. 🙂

  • “Th” sound to disappear from English in coming decades?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

    The “th” sound, which had its own letter – thorn (Þ, þ) in Old and Middle English – could disappear from spoken British English, today’s Daily Telegraph reports.

    By 2066, linguists are predicting that the “th” sound will vanish completely in london because there are so many foreigners who struggle to pronounce interdental consonants – the term for a sound created by pushing the tongue against the upper teeth.

    In the wider South East of England Estuary English – a hybrid of Cockney and received pronunciation (RP)– is already being replaced by Multicultural London English (MLE), which is heavily influenced by Caribbean, West African and Asian Communities.

    The Telegraph is reporting on the release of the Sounds of The Future report produced by Dr. Dominic Watt and Dr. Brendan Gunn from the University of York.

    Other predictions from the authors include:

    • Sound softening – hardly anyone says ‘syoot’ for ‘suit’ any more and this trend will continue with the sharp corners knocked off words;
    • Yod dropping – words like ‘cute’ or ‘beauty’ will become ‘coot’ and ‘booty’;
    • Consonant smushing – ‘w’ and ‘r’ are already similar for many southern English speakers, but the letters could completely collapse into one sound, whilst Words with ‘ch’ and ‘j’ could also become indistinguishable;
    • Glottal stop – the slight linguistic trip which turns ‘butter’ into ‘bu’er’ in dialects like Cockney could become more widespread around the country.

    Commenting on the same report, the Newcastle Chronicle leads with the headline “The Geordie accent is on the way out say language experts“, remarking that language experts say that by 2066 the distinctive Geordie accent will sound like a southern one.

    The Sound of 2016 report was commissioned by bankers HSBC, to mark the “voice biometric” technology which the bank is rolling out to 15 million customers, so perhaps it’s worth mentioning here the usual disclaimer about not trusting information from someone trying to sell you something. 😀

  • Stare-struck hack?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    Modern British society seems obsessed with celebrity culture: this is no more evident than in the mainstream media; and such is true of Bristol’s (news)paper of (warped) record, the Bristol Post.

    It would appear that no sooner does a Z-list non-entity have something to do with the city than the illiterati that constitute the current reporting staff of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth than they are lost for words – or for le mot juste at the very least.

    This is evident in a puff piece in today’s online edition featuring some nobody off some dire TV talent show, as per the obligatory screenshot below.

    sentence reads X Factor winner Alexandra Burke, who next week is staring Sister Act at the Bristol Hippodrome, has dropped three dresses sizes in less than six months

    So Bristol Post, is a nobody off the telly looking intently at a show at the Hippodrome or taking part in it? In the immortal words of Private Eye, I think we should be told.

  • Golfing news

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    The time-honoured business practice of top executives celebrating POETS Day on the fairway has come in for criticism from an unlikely source.

    At a Conservative Way Forward event at Westminster last week, the current international trade secretary and disgraced former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox MP is reported to have said:

    We’ve got to change the culture in our country. People have got to stop thinking about exporting as an opportunity and start thinking about it as a duty – companies who could be contributing to our national prosperity but choose not to because it might be too difficult or too time-consuming or because they can’t play golf on a Friday afternoon.

    Meanwhile in golfing “olds”, in April 2015, the disgraced former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox MP tweeted the photo below when standing for re-election.

    tweet reads latest student golfer at Tickenham Golf Club @TickenhamGolf #GE2015

    There’s an old adage about glass houses and stones, isn’t there?

  • Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.

    The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.

    The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.

    relevant sentence reads There has been a 40 per cent reduction in football in just five years across all of HSBC's branches

    Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.

    To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.

    As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?

    * = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.

  • Grauniad corrects itself

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

    Along with the majority of the press, those writing for The Guardian occasionally confuse the written and spoken word when two languages are involved; somehow the British media have great difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart (posts passim).

    Yesterday The Guardian acknowledged its errors by publishing the following correction and clarification.

    One article (Merkel backs May’s decision not to trigger Brexit until next year, 21 July, page 6) referred to the chancellor “speaking in German with an official translator”, and another (No free trade without open borders, Hollande tells May, 22 July, page 1) referred to the president “speaking in French with an official translator”. While Collins dictionary says “translator” can mean “a person or machine that translates speech or writing”, our style guide advises using “interpreter” for people who work with the spoken word, and “translator” for those who work with the written word.

    Well done Grauniad; I’m glad your style guide acknowledges the correct use of terminology.

    Hat tip: Yelena McCafferty

  • No Latin please, we’re British!

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Tech

    The British government is to ban all Latin abbreviations on all its websites, allegedly to save confusion amongst users of accessibility software and non-English speakers.

    Writing in a post on the gov.uk blog, Persis Howe writes that he and his colleagues have several programs that read webpages for those with visual impairment read ‘eg’ incorrectly and that while ‘e.g.’ gets read correctly by screen readers, there are better, clearer ways of introducing examples for all users.

    Howe goes on to say that:

    We promote the use of plain English on GOV.UK. We advocate simple, clear language. Terms like eg, ie and etc, while common, make reading difficult for some.

    Anyone who didn’t grow up speaking English may not be familiar with them. Even those with high literacy levels can be thrown if they are reading under stress or are in a hurry – like a lot of people are on the web.

    Those in charge of the gov.uk website are therefore changing the site’s style guide and phasing out their usage, which will take some time as some 4,000 instances alone of eg have been found.

    Abbreviations such as eg and ie should be written properly with full-stops as e.g. and i.e. and the fact they are being allowed on government websites is a sign of the fall in standards of both writing and teaching English since I finished my formal education some four decades ago. The fact they these erroneously-written abbreviations are getting misinterpreted by software such as screen readers is a symptom, not the disease.

    While confusion amongst non-English speakers may be a valid reason to curtail the use of e.g. and i.e., meaning respectively exempli gratia (for the sake of an example) and id est (that is), etc. does not deserve to be lumped in with them as its use has spread around the world far from its origins in ancient Rome.

    One field in which the use of Latin phraseology abounds is the law and the administration of justice. However, it seems likely that Whitehall’s mandarins will be reluctant take on the horsehair wig and gown brigade on their use of terms from an empire that ceased to exist over 1,600 years ago.

    Commenting on the changes, the Daily Telegraph reports that campaigners said the decision was to give up Latin was “short-sighted” because they have been part of common parlance for hundreds of years.

    The Telegraph quotes Roger Wemyss Brooks of the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales, who said the following:

    Latin is part of our cultural heritage and it’s part of the basis of English. It unites us with other cultures throughout Europe and the world who have a connection with the Romance languages.

    It’s a very concise language which is used specifically for its precision and I think it’s short sighted to be giving it up.

  • Blunders at the speed of light

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    There was good news this week for Bristol businesses with a yearning for high speed internet connectivity.

    The Bristol Post reported on the deployment of ultra-fast 1 Gbps internet in the city.

    While journalists at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth are quite competent at their main task of churnalism, such as copying and pasting the words of wisdom given in press releases by men in suits – as in the article in question – standards slip dramatically and the absence of sub-editors and the associated lack of quality control are patently obvious when Post staff try simplifying complicated technical concepts, as shown by the following sentence.

    sentence reads These glass cables deliver an internet connection at the speed of light which is highly reliable and efficient

    Shall we just examine the above sentence in detail? There’s plenty wrong with it both technically and grammatically, which schoolchildren sitting their SATs examinations at ages 10 or 11 years would be embarrassed to get wrong.

    Firstly, those glass cables. The proper designation is “optical fibre cable“; and as is well known the correct use of terminology is important. An optical fibre cable is a cable containing one or more optical fibres that are used to carry light, whilst an optical fibre itself is a flexible, transparent fibre made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. So an optical fibre cable can be made of either glass or plastic, i.e. not solely glass.

    Data from an internet connection is transmitted as light down an optical fibre cable. Light travels at the speed of light. However, it is the method for providing the internet connection which is “highly reliable and efficient, not the speed of light. The subordinate clause, i.e. “which is highly reliable and efficient is misplaced and should at any rate have been preceded by a comma.

    Finally, there’s that speed of light; it’s so reliable and efficient that its precise value is 299,792,458 metres per second (approximately 3.00×108 m/s). It is commonly denoted as c, as in Einstein’s famous mass–energy equivalence formula. Furthermore, c is the maximum speed at which all matter – and hence information – in the universe can travel.

    In the slightly better old days when the Post still employed proper sub-editors, any decent holder of that position would have taken that sentence to bits and re-written it roughly as follows:-

    “These fibre optic cables deliver an internet connection reliably and efficiently at the speed of light.”

    Or alternatively:

    “These fibre optic cables deliver a reliable, efficient internet connection at the speed of light.”

    Unfortunately, local newspapers and their online analogues nowadays seem to have forgotten that quality matters and with quality comes a reputation and with the latter, authority.

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