The greengrocers’ – or superfluous – apostrophe has a special place if one’s selling bananas (shouldn’t that be banana’s? Ed.), but it looks sadly out of place in Bristol’s newspaper of record, which is what happened yesterday in this heartening story from the St George area of the city.
The offending punctuation even had the temerity to turn up in the item’s opening sentence, as follows:
Crofts End Church in St George has just opened the doors to it’s newly refurbished internet suite.
No doubt the bosses at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth believe the downward spiral in quality is a small price to pay for what they’re saving by not employing sub-editors.
Today’s Bristol Post reports North Somerset commuters travelling to Bristol during November and December will be able to travel to work for free under a scheme set up by North Somerset Council and coach operator The Kings Ferry Ltd.
The service will link Weston-super-Mare, Clevedon and Portishead with major employment areas around Bristol, including Aztec West, Rolls Royce, Royal Mail and Airbus. Two routes will be operated: one starting in Weston and picking up in Clevedon and the other starting in Portishead.
The coaches to be used will be equipped with luxury seats, air conditioning, power sockets, drinks machines, toilets and free wifi.
This new commuter coach service will be free throughout November and December for everyone who registers at www.bristolcommute.com by the end of October.
The community around Felix Road Adventure Playground would be so grateful if you could complete the on-line petition which is below. What we are trying to do is collect 3.5k signatures to trigger a debate in the council chamber. We want to ensure that a long term sustainable solution is found for all the adventure playgrounds in the city.
Can you please sign the petition now on-line and forward this email to all your Bristol contacts.
One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?
Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂
Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:
I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.
The Bristol Post website carries an initial report today of a fire last night at Ashton Court, a 17th century mansion house in north Somerset owned by Bristol City Council.
Allegedly penned by someone called DanielEvans1, the third paragraph of the piece reads as follows:
A total of six Avon Fire and Rescue pumps and an aerial appliance were need to extinguish the fire in the early hours.
An inability to conjugate the verb ‘to need’ correctly is evidently no barrier to employment as a journalist at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. 😉
I’ve seen this fruit van a few times on Cumberland Road in recent weeks. At the foot of the offside door is a message to the light-fingered with a penchant for bananas.
When I volunteered many years ago on producing Planet Easton – a community newspaper for my part of Bristol – one of the hardest tasks for the editorial team was devising headlines for articles.
However, one unnamed employee at The Argus in Brighton deserves a special mention for the example below, a fine example of the use of alliteration and homophones.
The equipment is now being installed in 2 internet cafés in Lomé, the Togolese capital. Both internet cafés will be open to the public, although some time will be set aside each week for special user groups, such as orphanage children, who will receive computer training, and micro-finance clients. In addition, The cafés will provide a learning and employment opportunity for local people and aim to be profitable in about a year, earning income from providing internet access, printing and copying services.
Jo Earl, from UWE Volunteering, co-ordinated students from UWE’s Department of Computer Science & Creative Technologies to make the computers ready for use.
“Four volunteers worked as a team to assess the donated equipment, install operating systems and additional software. In total 84 PCs were shipped and the students worked really hard on a complex and time-consuming task,” said Jo.
“After refurbishing the computers, our next big task was shipping the PCs from Frenchay campus,” continued Jo, who worked with UWE facilities manager Richard Bird on packing and loading the computers, printers, desks and chairs into a shipping container.
The Bristol Post website is an online disaster that just keeps on giving, as in today’s example in the screenshot below where the unnamed hapless hack can’t tell the difference between looking for something and being debauched. 🙂