language | Steve Woods

The new British invasion

13/04/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics
One of my regular weekly listens is The Coffee Klatch presented by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse of Inequality Media.

Bob’s and Heather’s are two of the few voices of sanity I hear coming across the Atlantic from a country where the head of state wants to Make America Grate Again (or something like it. Ed.) when he’s not on the golf course.

However, what has surprised me in the last two weeks is Mr Reich’s increasingly regular use of British English vocabulary.

Yesterday, for instance, he used the rude and informal term shite to describe one of the authoritarian Trump regime’s latest outrages, whilst the week before he defined another as bonkers.

We’ll return to bonkers later.

However, it seems your ‘umble scribe is not the only one to have noticed British English. Yesterday’s Guardian drew attention to the increasing use of British English terms in the USA, particularly amongst the young.

It states:

The most common was bonkers, meaning “absurd”, which was applied to topics from politics to sports to internet trends, according to the language learning platform Babbel.

The rest of the Top Ten Briticisms are:
- Amongst, rather than “among”;
- Queue, as opposed to “line”;
- Wonky;
- Cheeky;
- Snarky;
- Cheers, in the context of thanking someone;
- Keen, i.e. enthusiastic;
- Maths instead math; and finally
- Nil.
The piece notes that this phenomenon is partly fuelled by British musicians such as Charli xcx, as well as newspapers such as the Grauniad creating US editions, as well as general “global culturization“.

However, if your correspondent were to pick holes in the piece, it would be with the following assertion:

In addition to the list of words, researchers examined the demographics of the speakers. They found that the use of “bonkers” is most common among gen Z, whose members accounted for 77% of uses in the database. People aged 66 and older didn’t use it at all. Meanwhile, 90% of “bonkers” speakers were women, and 97% lived in urban areas.

Mr Reich, like your ‘umble scribe, is over 66 and therefore incapable of using vocabulary such as bonkers according to the academic researchers quoted.

In case Mr Reich happens to read this, corrections and clarifications can be submitted to the paper should you so wish. 😀
The Felon’s thought police

11/04/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

In 1948 an old Etonian then living of the Scottish island of Jura wrote a novel about future authoritarian dystopia.

The novel was written as a warning, although in recent decades even allegedly democratic governments seem to have used it more as a manual to control what their citizens not only do, but also think.
The novel is, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the main method of mind control was via the so-called thought police.
Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.

Along with the Thought Police, Orwell also developed the idea of thoughtcrime, i.e. the offence of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling regime.

Moving forward from 1948 to 2025 and the presence of the state’s thought police is very apparent, particularly at present in the United States of America under the regime 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, who has a mission to Make America Grate Again (or something similar. Ed.).

The Felon’s thought police have been particularly active, expunging DEI policies.

However, the thought police have also been active in the far-flung reaches of Uncle Sam’s domain, where the job of policing thoughts and ideas critical of or hostile to The Donald, his rule and his cronies falls to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service,, commonly abbreviated to ICE.

In a social media post which has since been deleted, ICE included ideas in a list of of targets from which it was keeping Trump’s Grate America safe, according to the Huffington Post.

Ideas thought illegal include any objections and/or criticism of US support for the continuing Israeli genocide in and annexation of the Palestinian territories of the Gaza strip and West Bank.

But returning to the far-flung reaches of Uncle Sam’s domain referred to above, these also include the confines of the grandly titled Pituffik Space Base, recently the venue for an insult our allies session by the deeply unpleasant JD Vance (posts passim).

The alleged vice-president’s remarks during his brief three-hour visit did not go down too well with the base commander, Col. Susan Meyers, according to Military.com. In the aftermath of Vance’s brief stopover, Col. Meyers sent a message to all personnel at Pituffik seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and Guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance’s appearance.

It is not clear whether Meyers is still serving as commander of the 821st Space Base Group following her email, but the email itself will have come to the attention of the thought police.
JD’s worldwide charm offensive continues

08/04/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

Back in 1936 an American writer and teacher of courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills called Dale Carnegie wrote a self-help book entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People. According to Wikipedia, over 30 million copies of the book have been sold.

Nevertheless, judging by both their actions and statements – both private and public – it can be safely assumed that none of the senior members of the Trump regime have bought copies, assuming of course they are intelligent enough to read.

Their playbook seems to be the complete opposite of Carnegie’s goal, i.e. How to Lose Friends and Irritate People.

Kindly step forward with no style at all one James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman. Ed.), inexplicably made vice-president of the United States by 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.

As revealed in so-called Signalgate (posts passim), James David, ably assisted by Pete Hegseth, The Felon’s totally unqualified pick for Defence Secretary, who though it perfectly fine to insult European NATO allies. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/no10-slams-trump-cabinet-attack-on-freeloading-europe_uk_67e26eabe4b06e4e058d2f42, the relevant part of the Signal messaging thread reads as follows:

Vance said: “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

Hegseth then replied three minutes later, saying: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

For those that don’t know their history, the only time NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked was by the United States after the September 11th attacks. Several of those free-loading European nations contributed to the subsequent US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, putting their troops in harm’s way for Uncle Sam.

Now James Donald is at it again. This time he’s insulting the Chinese, referring to them as peasants. His words are reported to have been the following:

We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.

In response Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said:

“It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

I’d agree with Mr Lin that it is sad, but not surprising given James Donald’s past remarks in respect of European allies, not to mention his appalling attitude to Greenland and the obsession of his boss therewith.
Mermaids, volcanism and… Google Translate!

18/03/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

Google Translate, the Mountain View behemoth’s translation service is noted for not being very good on technical terminology, even of the most basic kind. Furthermore, it also struggles with a little thin called context, i.e. the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

When Google Translate gets the context wrong and confuses protecting the public with ancient Greek mythological figures, the result is at the very least amusing and at must alarming and downright dangerous, as revealed by the following social media post by Prof. Jenni Barclay of the University of Bristol.

Prof. Barclay’s research is the reduction of risk and prevention of disaster in volcanic settings, with a particular focus both on volcanic processes and the social processes that amplify volcanic risk.

My question for Prof. Barclay is are mermaids a social process? 😉

Mis-translations definitely are!
All day?

06/03/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

A crime against the English language appeared in my social media feed today. It loomed out of a photograph of part of the menu from an unidentified McDonald’s drive through somewhere in the United States.

Dies irae* if you roll up at 1.01 pm?

It centres on the use of the word day whose meaning for this context is provided by Merriam-Webster:

“the time of light between one night and the next”.

When combined with the words all and breakfast one would expect the fare proffered to be provided throughout the hours of daylight between sunrise and sunset; or at the very least to be available between the business’ opening and closing times.
Not “ONLY UNTIL 1PM” as the menu shouts loudly.

The picture seems to have been taken some while ago, as the price of eggs in the USA has rocketed due to avian influenza and Walmart is rationing egg purchases. The egg shortage has not gone unnoticed under the golden arches either: Newsweek reports a customer of a McDonald’s in Fairfield, Connecticut was charged $7.29 per Egg McMuffin and complained about it on social media.

* = Day of wrath (usually divine. Ed.).
Telling the truth costs NZ diplomat his job

06/03/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

The BBC reports that New Zealand’s right wing new Zealand First party foreign minister Winston Peters has dismissed his country’s high commissioner (that’s Commonwealth speak for ambassador. Ed.) to London after the latter told a few home truths about 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.

According to the BBC:
At an event in London on Tuesday, High Commissioner Phil Goff compared efforts to end the war between Russia and Ukraine to the 1938 Munich Agreement, which allowed Adolf Hitler to annex part of Czechoslovakia without any involvement of the Czechoslovak government.

The Munich Agreement was signed on 30th September 1938, by Nazi Germany, the United Kingdom (represented by prime minister Neville Chamberlain. Ed.), France and Fascist Italy and provided for the German annexation of part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, where more than three million people, mainly ethnic Germans, lived.

Neville Chamberlain returned triumphantly to Britain proclaiming he’d achieved “peace in our time” and waving a piece of paper allegedly including Hitler’s signature above his head.

One of the critics of Chamberlain was Winston Churchill, who was to succeed Chamberlain as the UK’s second wartime prime minister. Churchill remarked:

You had the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, yet you will have war.

Mr Goff noted that, “President Trump has restored the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office. But do you think he really understands history?”

In support of Mr Goff, Trump’s woeful knowledge of history is a matter of public record. In July 2019 claimed in a speech Continental Army “manned the air” and “took over the airports” during the Revolutionary War, despite the fact that the Wright brothers’ first flight did not take place in 1903, one hundred and twenty years after the end of the American revolution.

The BBC piece describes Mr Goff as “a veteran politician who had been high commissioner since January 2023. Before that, he served for two terms as mayor of Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city, and was leader of the Labour Party from 2008 to 2011. He had also held several ministerial portfolios, including justice, foreign affairs and defence“.
Muskrat less popular by the day

25/02/2025 Steve WoodsOddities, Politics, Social Media, Tech

With the inauguration of the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, it has been noticed that a certain level of authoritarianism – or even fascism – has entered American politics in The Felon’s desire to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.).

Of course, The Felon is not implementing his far-right agenda in isolation.

One of his biggest aides and pro-tem best buddy is the fascist known as Elon Reeve Musk, a man of capable of wielding vast wealth but very few brain cells. He is currently leading the charge to destroy US federal government departments in the drive for alleged efficiency; and is messing up badly, on account of which his approval rating in the USA is rapidly declining, but has yet to reach the levels seen in the UK.

The Muskrat is of course best known for being the man who invested in Tesla cars, which was incorporated by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. The Muskrat was only involved in the company’s first funding round, i.e. he just provided the money, not the technical expertise.

Partly as a result of The Muskrat’s overt fascist sympathies, The Muskrat’s popularity has been adversely affected.

Tesla car sales have also been affected by The Muskrat’s links to The Felon and his fascist sympathies too. As The Guardian reports, sales of Tesla in Europe in January 2025 were half what they were the previous year.

In addition to this, the Tesla factory on the outskirts of Berlin has been used as a screen for another action by Led By Donkeys (posts passim), whilst showrooms have been targeted by demonstrators and even defaced.

In London, fake Tesla advertisements showing a saluting Muskrat and claiming the vehicles – renamed Swasticars – go from zero to 1939 in 3 seconds have started appearing.

Finally, in other news, The Muskrat, who also hold Canadian citizenship via his mother, is the subject of a federal petition seeking to revoke his citizenship. At the time of writing it has over 237,000 signatures.
A put-down from Linus

17/02/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Open Source, Politics, Social Media, Tech

Linux was once famously described as Communism by former Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer.

The non-corporate, contributive and sharing nature of free and open source software and operating systems is one aspect that has always made it attractive to your ‘umble scribe, who comes from a family where both branches have been left-leaning for three generations and possibly longer.

Linus Torvalds, the creator and chief developer of the Linux kernel, the heart of the operating system, has a reputation for plain speaking, to put matters politely.

Linus has responded forthrightly – but mostly politely to someone who aimed the phrase “woke Communist propaganda” in his direction via social media recently and set out his political views plainly for all to see, as shown in the following screenshot.

Thank you, Linus, for your humanity, never mind the kernel. 😀
Nanny meets fascism

09/02/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

In 1964, Walt Disney released Mary Poppins starring Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke, the man with the worst Cockney accent ever to be recorded for release on celluloid.

One of the film’s biggest song and dance tunes was a catchy little number sung by the two stars and entitled “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious“.

According to the song’s Wikipedia page, songwriters the Sherman Brothers have given several conflicting explanations for the word’s origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. At another time they are on record as having written the following:

When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. … The word as we first hear it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus.

Scroll forward sixty-one years from Mary Poppins on the silver screen and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious has become part of the English language.

Furthermore, as my social media timeline this week has revealed, the word itself has been parodied and used as a pun in connection with one person in particular, the disgraced 47th and 45th president of the United States, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, who is currently dealing enthusiastically and vindictively with punishing political opponents, as well as dismantling the federal government as part of his mission to Make America Grate Again (or something like that. Ed.)

Sounds about right!
OpenAI, an irony-free company

29/01/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech
AI, we keep being told is the next big thing in the wonderful world of information technology. So far most AIs out in the wild have been developed at great expense and require vast amounts of electricity to work.

Until now.

In the last week or so the AI world has been shaken by the latest version of DeepSeek, an AI developed by the Chinese.

The latest version of Deepseek (R1) provides responses comparable to other contemporary LLMs, such OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 despite being trained at a significantly lower cost—stated at US$6 mn. compared with $100 mn. for OpenAI’s GPT-4 in 2023. Furthermore, Deepseek only requires one-tenth of the computing power of a comparable LLM. This caused a 17% drop in the share price of Nvidia, the main supplier of AI hardware.

However, DeepSeek is not without its limitations. As The Guardian found out, the DeepSeek chatbot becomes very taciturn and tongue-tied when asked questions which the Chinese government finds sensitive. When asked the following questions, the AI assistant responded: “Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
- What happened on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen Square?
- What happened to Hu Jintao in 2022?
- Why is Xi Jinping compared to Winnie-the-Pooh?
- What was the Umbrella Revolution?
In addition, DeepSeek and other Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country’s “core socialist values”, that “incites to subvert state power and overthrow the socialist system” or “endangers national security and interests and damages the national image”.

Besides its reluctance to answer questions the Chinese government doesn’t like, there’s another problem for DeepSeek – plagiarism.

The BBC reports that OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has accused DeepSeek and others using its work to make rapid advances in developing their own AI tools.

The fact that OpenAI is accusing others of plagiarising its work shows the company does not understand or admit either irony or hypocrisy as the company’s own LLM has been trained to some extent on material that infringes others’ copyright. The use of copyrighted materials for training LLMs is a topic that has also exercised German-speaking literary translators (posts passim).

Some companies clearly think ethics is a county with a speech defect in south-east England and that all is fair not just in love and war, but in business too.

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