English usage | Steve Woods

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.
Braking bad

09/05/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

The Bristol Post, no stranger to the pages of this blog, has a sister paper, the Western Daily Press.

Both used to be produced in Bristol and were printed at the – now vanished – print hall of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth.

There used to be an old Bristol joke about the local press. It ran as follows: there are 2 newspapers in Bristol; there’s the Western Daily Press, which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh (or any other 3 major UK cities of your choice. Ed.), and the Bristol Evening Post (as it was then called. Ed.), which carries stories about far-flung corners of the West Country such as London, Manchester and Edinburgh and 50 pages of classified advertising.

However, both the Post and the Press have more in common than their heritage and ownership. They are both badly written.

Thursday’s Press carried a piece which puts it firmly in homophone corner with a dunce’s hat on its head, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Press “journalists”, here’s where your anonymous colleague went wrong.

You confused the heterographic verbs to break and to brake.

The former, which you used, is a strong verb, also called an irregular verb; these verbs form the past tense or the past participle (or both) in various ways but most often by changing the vowel of the present tense form. In this instance, break (present tense), broke (past tense), broken (past participle).

The latter, which you should have used in this case, is a weak verb. These (also called regular verbs) form the past tense by adding -ed, -d, or -t to the base form (or present tense form) of the verb (e.g. call, called).

Got it now?

Good! 🙂
Research shows language you speak changes your view of the world

29/04/2015 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

In research that was published recently in Psychological Science, German-English bilinguals and German and English monoglots were studied to find out how different language patterns affected how they reacted in experiments.

This research shows that bilinguals can also view the world in different ways depending on the specific language in which they are operating, according to Mashable.

The past 15 years have seen extensive research on the bilingual mind, with most of the evidence pointing to the tangible advantages of being bilingual. Going back and forth between languages appears to be a kind of brain training, pushing your brain to be flexible.

To quote the abstract for the research paper:

People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Bilingual German and Frisian police station sign. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
By way of illustrating these differences, Mashable’s piece gives a handy example of these different world views

German-English bilinguals were shown video clips of events with a motion in them, such as a woman walking towards a car or a man cycling towards the supermarket. The participants were then asked to describe the scenes.

When such a scene is presented to a monoglot German speaker they will tend to describe the action and the goal of the action. Thus they would tend to say “A woman walks towards her car” or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. English monoglot speakers would simply describe those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a man is cycling”, without mentioning the goal of the action.

As regards the effect of the language being spoken on bilingual speakers’ perceptions of the world, they seemed to switch between these perspectives based on the language in which they were given the task. Germans fluent in English were just as goal-focused as any other native speaker when tested in German in their home country. However, a similar group of German-English bilinguals tested in English in the UK were just as action-focused as native English speakers.

Hat tip: Katya Ford.
Post exclusive: Bristol Rovers change kit

23/04/2015 Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

There’s a hidden exclusive in today’s online edition of the Bristol Post. Unknown to the fans and probably the club itself, the Post reveals that Bristol Rovers now play in “blue and white stripes“, as shown by the following screenshot.

For the benefit of passing Post journalists, here are the three strips currently used by Bristol Rovers. Please note the only stripes are on the alternative away colours and have one thin blue stripe. The pattern used on the regular strip is commonly known as “quarters“.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

The Post also mentions in the article that Catalonia’s CE Sabadell FC (who are in the Spanish Segunda División. Ed.) play in a strip “similar” to that of Rovers. FC Sabadell’s current strips are shown below and yes, the home strips do look very similar, even if the teams’ respective league positions do not; Rovers are chasing promotion from the Conference, whilst Sabadell are fighting relegation.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Let’s hope the players of both teams are more on target than Bristol’s alleged newspaper of record. 🙂

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