English usage | Steve Woods

An apposite typo?

10/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics

I’m not a regular reader of the minutes of meetings of Bristol City Council’s Audit Committee. However, there’s an absolute corker of a typographical error on page 3 of the draft minutes of its 24th September 2013 meeting (PDF).

Will anyone down at the Counts Louse (as real Bristolians call or) or City Hall (as the Mayor has renamed it) be eagle-eyed enough to notice?

Under no circumstances Lord Fraud should not be confused with Lord Freud, a Conservative peer who only pretends to be a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions with responsibility for welfare reform. 😉
Bristol Post Balls – what funs!

01/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Every story needs a good, pertinent and accurate headline, as shown by this item in the news section of today’s online edition of the Bristol Post.

The headline has been corrected since the above screenshot was taken at 8.00 am.
Guardian latest media outlet to confuse translators and interpreters

26/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Tech

The Guardian, immortalised in Private Eye as The Grauniad for its error-prone typographical propensities, now reveals its errors are not restricted to orthography.

The home page of today’s online edition has a link to an item on machine translation and online translation tools. The perils of machine translation is a topic which has also featured on this blog (posts passim).

However, the link to the report is illustrated by an image depicting interpreters at work, as the following screenshot shows.

This means The Guardian is now the latest media outlet in the UK willing to employ illiterates who can’t tell interpreters from translators along with the likes of the BBC (posts passim) and the Bristol Post (posts passim).

This blog has a handy illustrated guide on the difference between these two sorts of linguists should employees of any of the above organisations need enlightenment.
Bristol Post Balls – spelling it out

21/09/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.

Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.

Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.

How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.

This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.
Made redundant? No, I was ‘catalyzed’

13/09/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics, Social Media

For decades, managers have been trying to come up with anodyne terms for dismissing people and making them redundant.

Some of the more common ones are: give someone their notice, get rid of, discharge, terminate; lay off; sack, give someone the sack, fire, boot out, give someone the boot, give someone their marching orders, show someone the door, can, pink-slip; cashier.

Following this trend, bosses at Bristol City Council have now come up with another, ‘to catalyze’, as evidenced by a mole down the Counts Louse (since renamed ‘City Hall’ by Mayor Red Trousers (posts passim). Ed.) who tweeted the following yesterday.

I’m sure all employees of the council are reassured that the management has their best interests at heart by not wanting to hurt their feelings as they’re unceremoniously handed their P45s and shown the door.
Bristol Post Balls – is the paper now written by greengrocer’s?

07/09/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

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.
Running normally?

04/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media

Have you ever wondered why your train is running late?

The National Rail Enquiries Twitter feed is very useful for providing answers, as per the typical tweet below.

I can hear those of you with an acute sense of English already asking whether “running normally” on the UK rail network usually involves “following a broken down train” (because that’s what travelling by rail normally feels like? Ed.). 😉
Bristol Post Balls – verb conjugation

31/08/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

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. 😉
The art of the newspaper headline

27/08/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

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.

Beat that, Bristol Post! 🙂
Bristol Post Balls – perverts on wheels

19/08/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

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. 🙂

Sick and ye shall find?

Hat tip: Julien Weston

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