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After the book and film, the HTML colo(u)r chart
There’s been a lot of interest in the media in recent days over the impending release of the film of E.L. James’ 2011 erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey.
Following hard on the heels of the media interest, comes the HTML colo(u)r* chart.
If you need to pick colours for web pages, fonts and the like, the W3C has a handy picker.
* In HTML American spellings – e.g. color, center – are used.
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Red card offence?
Not being a regular reader of the sports pages, particularly not the football coverage, I’m indebted to Redvee once again for the screenshot below of an excerpt from yesterday’s Bristol Post report of the League One (that’s the Third Division in old money. Ed.) match between MK Dons and Bristol City FC.
Isn’t defecating on the pitch a red card offence? 😉 Besides this, his excrement might have hit spectators behind the goal…
The article has since been corrected.
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Hello subvertising
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.
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The price of petrol – an object of worship
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 holyNowhere 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. 🙂
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No sexual partners in Wigan?
So far my experience of Wigan has been as the home of Uncle Joe’s Mint Balls and the birthplace of George Formby, as well as a stop on the railway journey up to my sister’s home in Darwen.
It now seems that Wigan has another claim to fame: no sexual partners are available there if there’s any credence behind the front page from the Wigan Evening Post shown below. 😉
The details of this attempted coupling can also be read on Wigan Today.
Hat tip: Morna Simpson
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Vous n’êtes pas Charlie
Today an anti-terror rally is being held in Paris in memory of those killed at the offices of Charlie Hebdo (posts passim) and at a Kosher supermarket in recent days.
It is said that up to 1.5 mn. people are attending the rally.
Amongst the attendees are many politicians, led by President Hollande. Many foreign politicians are also attending.
Charlie Hebdo was a beacon of free speech and freedom of the press. Several of the foreign politicians in attendance represent regimes whose treatment of the press is less than enlightened. They include:
- King Abdullah of Jordan, which last year sentenced a Palestinian journalist to 15 years in prison with hard labour;
- Turkey’s Prime Minister Mr Davutoglu. Turkey imprisons more journalists than any other state;
- Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, whose armed forces killed 7 journalists in Gaza in 2014;
- Egypt’s Prime Minister Mr Shoukry. Egypt has not just jailed Al Jazeera journalists (now facing a retrail), but has also detained photojournalist Shawkan for more than 500 days;
- Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia, which last year jailed a journalist for “insulting a government servant“;
- Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra of Algeria, which has so far detained journalist Abdessami Abdelhai for 15 months without charge;
- Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates, which in 2013 held an Egyptian journalist incommunicado for a month on suspicion of links with the Moslem Brotherhood;
- Prime Minister Jomaa of Tunisia, which recently jailed blogger Yassine Ayan for 3 years for “defaming the army“;
- Messrs Irakli Garibashvili and Boiko Borisov, the Prime Ministers of Georgia and Bulgaria respectively. Both Bulgaria and Georgia have past form for attacking and beating up journalists;
- Eric H. Holder, the Attorney General of the United States. Police in Ferguson have recently detained and assaulted Washington Post reporters;
- Prime Minister Samaras of Greece, where riot police regularly beat up journalists at demonstrations, including injuring two journalists at a protest in June 2014;
- Jens Stoltenberg, the Secretary General of NATO, an organisation yet to be held to account for deliberately bombing and killing 16 Serbian journalists in 1999;
- President Keita of Mali, where journalists are expelled for covering human rights abuses;
- Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al Khalifah, the Foreign Minister of Bahrain, which is the world’s 2nd largest jailer of journalists in per capita terms;
- Sheikh Mohamed Ben Hamad Ben Khalifa Al Thani of Qatar, which jailed a man for 15 years for writing a poem;
- Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who had several journalists jailed for insulting him in 2013;
- Prime Minister Cerar of Slovenia, which sentenced a blogger to six months’ imprisonment in 2013 for “defamation“;
- Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland, where “blasphemy” is still a criminal offence;
- Prime Minister Kopacz of Poland, which raided a magazine’s offices to seize recordings that might embarrass the ruling party;
- UK Prime Minister Cameron, whose security agencies forced The Guardian to destroy hard drives containing documents it had obtained from US whistle-blower Graham Snowden threatened the paper with prosecution if it continued to report Snowden’s revelations.
Hat tip: Daniel Wickham.
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Dutch language is long-winded and peculiar, research reveals
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‘.
Where Dutch is spoken. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Key – Dark blue: native and majority language; Blue: Afrikaans (daughter language); Light blue: secondary (non-official language), where some knowledge persists Plural form
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.”
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Je suis Charlie
Social media has responded quickly to the horrific attack on the offices of French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris today, which resulted in 12 deaths and 5 injured. Four of those killed were Charlie Hebdo cartoonists Charb, Cabu, Tignous and Georges Wolinski.
The press office of Amnesty International in France has described that attack as “A black day for press freedom”.
Many Twitter accounts changed their avatar to the Je suis Charlie image shown below, whilst many tweets were also tagged with the #JesuisCharlie hashtag.
Some of the harshest condemnations of the attack have come from the attackers’ co-religionists. The imam of Drancy, Hassen Chalghoumi, is reported to have said: “Their barbarism has nothing to do with Islam”.
My deepest condolences to the victims and their families.
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Beyond compere
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? 😉
The word you’re looking for, struggling Post journalist, is compere, whose dictionary definition is:
com·pere
(kŏm′pâr′) Chiefly British
n.
The master of ceremonies, as of a television entertainment program or a variety show.
v. com·pered, com·per·ing, com·peres
v.tr.
To serve as master of ceremonies for.
v.intr.
To serve as the master of ceremonies.
