English usage

  • Home Office’s racist van investigated by ASA

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    Yahoo News reports that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is investigating the recent Home Office poster van campaign targeting immigrants and dubbed the ‘racist van’ due to the crass insensitivity that is a hallmark of the Whitehall PR machine nowadays (posts passim).

    image of billboard van showing Home Office's anti-immigration message

    The ASA has so far received 60 complaints expressing concerns that the advertisements were “reminiscent of slogans used by racist groups to attack immigrants in the past”.

    The racist van was driven around the London boroughs of Barnet, Hounslow, Barking & Dagenham, Ealing, Brent and Redbridge – all areas with a high percentage of ethnic minority residents – as part of a £10,000 Home Office pilot scheme, which ended at the end of July.

    As a counterpart to the Home Office’s mobile billboard, human rights and civil liberties organisation Liberty drove its own ‘anti-racist van’ around the streets of the metropolis.

    Liberty's anti-racist van

  • North Somerset libraries to offer free wifi

    Steve WoodsBristol, Politics, Tech

    glassy wifi symbolNorth Somerset Council – Bristol’s immediate neighbour to the south – has announced that free wi-fi will be available in almost every library across North Somerset from 1st August.

    This will allow library users (not ‘customers’, as stated in your press release, North Somerset! Ed.) to bring their own laptops and other devices into their local library to use the internet.

    Wi-fi will be available to everyone by simply visiting any library during opening hours. There will be no need to book and visitors will not need to be a library member to set up an account, although first time users will need to approach a member of the library staff to set up an account.

    However, there’s library where this facility won’t be available – the mobile library.

    Potential users can find out more details of the scheme and opening times at http://www.n-somerset.gov.uk/mylocallibrary.

    First posted on Bristol Wireless.

  • Bristol Post Balls 4 – a classic homophone

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Today’s cock-up by the Bristol Post, from a story entitled ‘Man on lilo rescued after drifting out to sea off Weston-super-Mare’, has gained Bristol’s newspaper of record a seat in homophone corner.

    For the benefit of passing Post journalists a homophone is “a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of “rise”), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too.”

    Now let’s see (or sea. Ed.) what landed the Post this particular accolade.

    screenshot of homophone from Bristol Post
    What did he drift out to see, Bristol Post?

  • Boycott bingo

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    The second Ashes Test match is currently underway at Lord’s in London between England and Australia.

    Over the years I’ve become a fan of the live coverage provided by the Test Match Special team on Radio 4 LW; local Bristol community station BCfm interferes with the signal on Radio 4’s FM signal where I live.

    portrait of Geoff Boycott
    Geoff Boycott
    As a consequence, I’ve got to know and appreciate the consummate broadcasting skills of Aggers, Blowers and company, including Geoff Boycott, regarded by some as the ‘greatest living Yorkshireman’.

    One of the joys of listening to the coverage is the banter between the team, especially the ribbing of Boycott and the interplay between him and Aggers in particular.

    Now Geoffrey is not known for keeping his counsel to himself, being a man of strong opinions. Like all of us, he’s got little foibles in his speech and recurring phrases, affectionately known as ‘Boycottisms‘. These Boycottisms have been used to produce ‘Boycott bingo’ cards like the example below.

    image of a Boycott bingo card

    You can get your own Boycott bingo card at http://boycott.gdb.me/.

    Play along and enjoy the game!

  • Bristol Post Balls 2

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    Below is a screenshot of the story in today’s Bristol Post reporting on Professor Peter Higgs – one of the team that postulated the existence of the particle named after him back in the 1960s – being granted the freedom of the city of Bristol.

    screenshot of Bristol Post article
    Headline quality control in action. Click on image for full size version.

    Professor Higgs is a former pupil of Bristol’s Cotham Grammar School.

    For a local media report of the event that has a proper headline, I recommend Bristol 24/7’s offering.

    Bristol & Avon Family History Society has some interest background information on the history of the Freedom of Bristol and Burgesses, as Freemen (and they were men in medieval times. Ed.) were originally known.

  • Inflation in North Somerset

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

    The phrase “to spend a penny”, meaning to use a public lavatory, has its origins in the use of coin-operated locks on public toilets in the UK. When these were first introduced, the fee for use was normally one penny (1d); and it stayed at that level for decades, well into the second half of the twentieth century.

    However, the cost of being caught short and having to use a public lavatory has undergone a massive inflationary rise if a report in today’s Bristol Post is to be believed.

    picture of 10 shilling note

    Pictured above is an old English bank note with a face value of 10 shillings; that’s equivalent to 240 pence.

    The Bristol Post report states that people could be charged up to 50p (that’s ten shillings in old money. Ed.) to spend a penny in a new block of town centre toilets in Portishead, which could cost up to £40,000 to build.

    The Post quotes Portishead Town Council Clerk Jo Duffy as follows on the likely cost of spending a penny:

    There would be a charge levied for using the toilets, which could be up to 50 pence per visit. However the town council is keen to keep the charge at a lower level of around 20 pence if possible.

    Even 20 pence for a pee is extortionate, in my opinion.

    This blog has covered the peculiarities of life in North Somerset before now (posts passim) and at least one person leaving a comment on the Post report feels relieved he’s not a resident:

    Every day I wake up and thank the Lord that I don’t live in North Somerset.

  • That’ll lean you!

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    This blog has written before about politicians’ scrapes with technology and their apparent inability to cope with it (posts passim).

    Below is a screenshot of a tweet (since deleted) by Andrew Selous, the Tory MP for South West Bedfordshire commenting on Chancellor of the Exchequer Gideon Osborne’s comprehensive spending review in the House of Commons earlier today.

    Tweet by Andrew Selous MP
    Tweet by Andrew Selous MP

    Andrew should also know that the first rule about criticising others’ use of language is to make sure one’s own is impeccable (but they probably omitted to teach him that at Eton. Ed.).

    Hat tip: Phil Gibson.

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