English usage | Steve Woods

Spiritual leader moonlights as police officer

14/10/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Reading the captions on photographs in the local press can be a real education.

For instance, thanks to those dedicated people who write captions for articles on the Bristol Post website, I now know what a branch of discount retailer Lidl looks like, although I shall have to travel to Paignton to see the real thing.

However, far greater secrets can be revealed by photo captions. An article in yesterday’s Bristol Post revealed that, unknown to the rest of the world, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, is actually a police officer in Avon & Somerset Constabulary, as shown by the following screenshot.

His Holiness must have found some body-altering drugs during his recent visit to the Glastonbury Festival! 😉
Bristol’s rudest place name?

10/10/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

The other night conversation down the pub turned to Bristol place names.

Wherever one is, place names give a locality character. They commemorate local personalities, such as Mary Carpenter Place in Bristol’s St Pauls area, as well as national figures, e.g. Nelson Parade in Bedminster.

Others were named after the trades practised or goods traded on them. Bristol used to have a Milk Street and a Cheese Lane; it still has a Wine Street and a Corn Street, together with Old Bread Street.

Some street names are stranger and Bristol does not disappoint here either. There’s Zed Alley in the city centre, along with Counterslip down by the floating harbour. Counterslip is a corruption of Countess’ slipway, a reference to one of the long-vanished amenities on the then tidal River Avon of Bristol’s long-demolished castle.

However, odd street names are not confined to Bristol’s centre. Up in Clifton one can find There and Back Again Lane, whose signs are a favourite target for the larcenous intentions of drunken student. Just beyond Durdham Downs, towards Stoke Bishop, is Pitch and Pay Lane. The origins of the lane’s name apparently hark back to times of plague when goods and money would be exchanged by being thrown across the thoroughfare.

Besides food and drink, other bodily needs are also commemorated. Along with other medieval towns and cities, once boasted a Grope Lane – to use the polite version – where ladies of negotiable affection were purported to ply their trade. The earliest written reference to Bristol’s Grope Lane I’ve found relates to 1433. It was previously known as Halliers Lane. Nowadays it’s better known as Nelson Street.

Besides streets and roads, fields also have names: and it is to one of these that one has to turn to find Bristol’s rudest place name – Fockynggroue.

Below is part of the abstract of a paper by linguistics professor Richard Coates of the University of the West of England (UWE):

The lost field-name Fockynggroue is recorded in the perambulation which constitutes the bulk of a Bristol charter conjecturally of 30 September (inspeximus 30 October), 47 Edward III, that is 1373. This document was drawn up when Bristol was granted county status.¹ The field was in the region north(-west) of Brandon Hill between locations identifiable in modern times as Woodwell Lane and Crescent (names now lost, near and in St George’s Road) and Cantock’s Close.² A. H. Smith, the editor of The Place-Names of Gloucestershire, offered no explanation, although he had obviously reflected on it because he classified it in the element-index as containing a ‘significant word’ (i.e. not a personal name), but without further elaboration.³ Perhaps he thought it too risqué to dwell on or too obvious to deserve comment, but, if so, he omitted to address a consequent issue in the lexical history of English. He did not cite the additional forms given in Bristol Charters.⁴ These are taken from perambulations of the city boundaries taken between the granting of county status and 1901: ‘Fukkyngroue, Pocking, Fokeing, Foking or Pucking Grove’. The name certainly lasted till around 1900, when a printed abstract of title for Hither & Inner Pucking Grove from 1707–1842 and a sale agreement of 1899 for the place were in existence.⁵

In modern times Fockynggroue has been diverted from its past as a location of carnal pleasures. Where it once helped generations of locals enjoy loving trysts and the pleasures of the flesh, it now caters for the intellect, having been built over as part of the campus of the University of Bristol.
Greenwash Capital news: streets of Bristol to get filthier

01/09/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics, Social Media

In a move that will put yet another black mark against they city’s undeserved year as European Green Capital, the streets of Bristol are set to get even filthier than they are already.

Today’s Bristol Post reports that the number of street cleaners in Bristol has been cut by nearly a fifth since Bristol City Council took waste management and street cleansing back in-house last month from contractors Kier Group, those well-known supporters of former worker blacklisting outfit The Consulting Association.

Fly-tipping on Pennywell Road, Easton

According to the Post, the council-run Bristol Waste Company (BWC) has notified “30 to 40” agency workers at the Hartcliffe depot that they would no longer be required as of yesterday (Monday). This will cut their numbers by about one-fifth. These workers deal with street cleaning and collecting fly-tipping.

In addition, the Hartcliffe staff claim they have not been consulted on the cuts and accused the council of trying to save money at the expense of cleanliness (Bristol City Council has a long and proud tradition of avoiding and/or messing up consultation. Ed.).

Furthermore, the Hartcliffe depot staff also claim they been provided with inadequate equipment to do the job. One anonymous worker is quoted by the Post as saying:

Some of the guys haven’t been given clean gloves or protective gear, and many are still working with Kier equipment. The protective clothing is not adequate, and we have to deal with needles and dog poo and stuff.

If there are insufficient staff available at BWC for the job in hand, perhaps Bristol City Council could reassign staff from elsewhere: ideal candidates for redployment and kitting out with a fluorescent uniform, safety gloves, boots and a broom would be those working in the local authority’s overstaffed press and PR department.

In other Greenwash Capital news, it would appear that Bristol Mayor George Ferguson couldn’t really care less about the city’s cleanliness according to the tweet below from Kerry McCarthy MP.

Synonyms for unimpressed include apathetic, disinterested, unconcerned, undisturbed, untroubled and unmoved.

If Kerry’s report of her meeting with the Mayor is accurate, that is a most disturbing development in the person whose supposed job is to take care the best interests of the city and its welfare.
Pomicide – word of the year?

07/08/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

I’ve written before of my love of the live cricket commentary on Radio 4 long wave (posts passim).

However, I could hardly believe my ears during the latest match in the Ashes series being played at Trent Bridge, Nottingham, home of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club.

England won the toss, elected to bowl first and put Australia into bat. Before lunch Australia were all out for 60 runs (including extras), clocking up the worst batting performance by an Australian team in an Ashes match for some 8 decades.

If I couldn’t believe my ears, one can just imagine how well such a shambolic performance with the bat went down in the Australian media.

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s sports headline writer perhaps encapsulated feelings best with the back page headline “It’s Pomicide“, as per the photograph below.

Whilst I take a rather ambiguous attitude to newspaper headline writers and their frequently inappropriate use of puns, the invention of Pomicide strikes me as most apposite. Should I recommend it to the Oxford English Dictionary for its word of the year accolade?
Tidy BS5 in the council chamber: the Mayor responds

07/08/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics

Bristol Mayor George Ferguson
Following my submission of a statement to last month’s full council meeting (posts passim), at which Hannah Crudgington’s video statement on fly-tipping received a standing ovation from Labour councillors, I’ve now received a written reply to my statement from Bristol’s elected Mayor, George Ferguson. Even though I had no opportunity to present my statement verbally to councillors due to the incompetent and thoroughly dreadful chairing of the full council meeting by Lord Mayor Clare Campion-Smith, all those submitting statements were promised a written response.

The response to my written statement has now been received and is reproduced in full below for the information and amusement of passing readers.

Dear Mr Woods,

Thank you for summiting [sic] your statement to Full Council in regards [sic] to the fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton.

Easton has historically been an area where greater resources have been needed, and this is still the case today: the Council provides more resources for this area to remove waste and litter than in most other parts of the city. The introduction of communal bins seems to have improved the situation in Easton; prior to their introduction there was more widespread fly tipping [sic] throughout the area. In some cases, however, this measure has led to fly-tipping occurring around the bins, as it has been observed in other parts of the city, from Clifton to St Pauls. The communal bin areas are proactively patrolled by our contractor, who responds to fly-tip and street cleansing reports made through Customer Services or submitted on webforms throughout Bristol. Training has been provided to our contractor’s operatives to search waste for evidence of its potential source & evidence is passed to Streetscene Enforcement Team to investigate.

We require the support of the public to help us identify offenders and would encourage all residents and visitors to Bristol to report incidents of fly-tipping they observe to Bristol City Council as soon as possible. To take enforcement action against offending individuals or businesses requires evidence and the more information we receive, the more likely we can build a case and target them. Recruitment is currently underway to return the Streetscene Enforcement Team to a full complement of 6 officers. This will allow for the officers to concentrate their activities within smaller areas and allow for more proactive work and operations. For instance, all businesses on Stapleton Road are currently in the process of being visited to check that they have relevant commercial waste contracts and make them aware that we are searching for evidence of commercial waste being deposited in the domestic communal bins. The Streetscene Enforcement Team continues to explore new ways of working with partners, both within the Council and local community, to target environmental crime and support improvements to the local environment. For this reason, we appreciate your efforts in working with us to achieve a cleaner Easton, and thank you for your patience while we effect the necessary improvements.

Yours sincerely,

(signed)

George Ferguson CBE
Mayor of Bristol

What strikes me about the response – apart from its occasionally abysmal English usage – is firstly its emollient, placatory tone: to begin with, it commiserates with me for the “fly-tipping and litter issues you are currently experiencing in Easton“. It’s not just now that I’m experiencing those so-called issues; I’ve watched the area get filthier for the last 4 decades!

Secondly, the response manages to duck a couple of major points, namely the disparity between the number of enforcement officers compared with the Council’s excessively large press, PR and communications staff (posts passim), as well as the response (if any) of council officers and Assistant Mayor Daniella Radice to ideas from elsewhere around the UK and world for combating fly-tipping (these have probably been kicked into the long grass by both the Assistant Mayor and officers under time-honoured “not invented here” rules. Ed.).

As the response was unsatisfactory, I shall be attempting to make another statement to full council in September and will draw the Mayor’s attention to the shortcomings in the response.

Finally, Hannah Crudgington received a reply to her video statement that was almost identical to mine. Isn’t it good to know that IT skills down the Counts Louse have reached the cut and paste level? 😉
Network Rail messes up on dog fouling

14/07/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

One of the great tools not available to previous generations of those producing print for public consumption is the spell checker – an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, email client, electronic dictionary or search engine.

However, some people and/or organisations still seem reluctant to use them, such as UK railway infrastructure operator Network Rail, which chickened out on the occasion shown below and thus qualified for a residency in Homophone Corner. 🙂
Microsoft sits in homophone corner

16/06/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

This blog has discussed homophones before (posts passim). Homophone corner is a space to which people who cannot distinguish their homophones are banished to consider the errors of their ways – rather like the corner of the classroom to which misbehaving children were exiled during my primary school days.

It now appears as though the curse of the homophone is spreading to the giants of the technology world, as shown by the following tweet from Nix Tran Stories.

I’ve used Microsoft Word/Office since the days of Windows 3.1 and its spelling and grammar checking tools have in my opinion never been particularly good: I’ve always run rings around them; and now it appears that the spellchecker has been coded by an illiterate.

I suppose the least I could do is pat the leader of the MS Office team on the shoulder and mouth the platitude “their, there, they’re!“. 😉
New Zealand MP caught using unparliamentary language by sign language interpreter

30/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

In politics passion often rises to the surface in the rough and tumble of debate; and that’s exactly what happened in the New Zealand parliament in the case of Ron Mark, a member of parliament for the conservative New Zealand First party.

The Mirror reports that Mr Mark became irritated with muttering from across the chamber during a pre-budget question time debate in a tense parliamentary session.

Ron Mark was interrupted by jeering from the Government benches and muttered “shut the f**k up” under his breath.

This went unnoticed by his fellow members, but a sign language interpreter who had been invited to parliament as part of sign language awareness week did hear his outburst and signed it for all to see.

Mr Mark later apologised for his unparliamentary language.

Hat tip: Atlas Translations.
More culinary sexism

16/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Perhaps taking its lead from a city centre café in Bristol (posts passim), multinational junk food chain McDonalds has now introduced sexism onto its menu.

The advertisement below was spotted on Easton Way, Bristol this morning.

Once again bacon and sausage are apparently foods exclusively for men. If any woman is ‘man enough’ to ask for them, what would that make her – a tomboy or a butch lesbian? Or simply unfeminine?

Answers in the comments below, please McDonalds.
Inspirational motto meets immovable object

15/05/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

When I worked for Imperial Tobacco many decades ago, I used to hate the inspirational texts that came on the desk calendars with which all office staff were issued. Another pet hate is company mottoes, which usually have that same inspirational or aspirational element.

Given my hostility to these forms of literature, the photograph below could do nothing else but provoke a smile: a truck driver – presumably on the road to success – tries do effect a short cut of his own and reduce the height of his trailer to 10 feet using a convenient railway overbridge.

Hat tip: Harry Tuttle.

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