Crapita’s mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting contract for the Ministry of Justice may not be getting as much publicity now as previously (posts passim), but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t stopped wasting public money, as the tweet below from yesterday reveals.
@TheCriminalBar Husband's trial with t/e 2-3 days has not yet started and day 3 tomorrow.Reason: #crapita not provided interpretor #mojwaste
As Leisha doesn’t mention the type of court involved, there’s no certainty how many thousands of pounds this laxity has cost, but once again justice is being delayed, contrary to one of the few clauses of Magna Carta still in legal effect (posts passim).
One might even think that the one organisation that should be concerned about this – the Ministry of Justice – seems to be less concerned with justice and more with covering up its own and Crapita’s serial incompetence.
The BBC – and Radio 4 in particular – is often criticised for being the voice of middle England speaking to itself.
However, it seems that Auntie is now making great strides to improve the diversity of its staff, as shown by the Tweet below, which was posted during last night’s broadcast of Any Questions.
Q3: Would a Yes vote in the forthcoming Scottish Referendum be the only way in which England could get it's own parliament? #bbcaq
Yes, Radio 4 is now employing greengrocers (shouldn’t that be greengrocer’s? Ed. 🙂 ), or at least people who know how to use superfluous (or greengrocers’) apostrophes.
Below is a picture of part of an actual election leaflet delivered recently to somewhere in South Bristol by the local Liberal Democrats.
Is it a three horse race too, Lib Dems?
Note that local party hacks have omitted to change this generic national leaflet’s wording from ‘Anywhere Council’ to the name of the relevant local authority.
I for one would like to wish the candidate involved – [Insert Name Here] – every success.
The Wig and Pen public house in Truro, Cornwall had some unexpected publicity earlier this week when a badly temporary temporary sign was snapped by an amused regular before being hurriedly removed by embarrassed staff, according to yesterday’s Western Daily Press.
By the time the sign came down, its fame had spread round the world by social media; and it’s easy to see why.
However, according to the Western Daily Press article, the sign itself was not the only linguistic clanger involved in the episode:
But a remember [sic] of staff named Georgie-Tim later took to Twitter to say: “Well, it got you’re attention!
After one’s had a collision, road traffic incident or ‘accident’, as discussed in the previous post, one virtually inevitable subsequent step is the submission of an insurance claim.
These too have their own vocabulary and are couched in terms intended to deflect blame away from the claimant.
This phenomenon was noted many years ago by comedian Jasper Carrot, as in the video below.
Man taken to hospital after his car collided with road sign in Avonmouth
The first sentence outlines how the incident occurred:
A man in his 40s had to be removed on a spinal board after his car collided with a road sign in Avonmouth.
Note how the car’s occupant – presumably its driver – plays a passive role; the car apparently collided with a road sign of its own volition without any human intervention. One would almost think that cars and other motor vehicles are so capricious and flighty that conscious action by human beings is imperative to stop the public highway becoming a large linear scrapyard in next to no time and remaining such permanently.
Perhaps a more accurate headline would have been Man taken to hospital after driving into road sign.
Similar examples of this use of English can be found in any local paper in the country.
However, such language is not confined to the print media. An similar example from inside the BBC in Bristol was posted on Twitter this morning (screenshot below).
Note the absence of any human involvement in the incident: a horse was killed by a fast car. Was it an unoccupied, autonomous vehicle? A more accurate rendition would be that a horse was killed by a fast driver.
Then there’s the way large swathes of the media report collisions using the noun accident to describe them. In the vast majority of cases, there’s nothing accidental about them. According to RoSPA, 95% of all road ‘accidents’ involve some human error, whilst a human is solely to blame in 76% of road ‘accidents’.
an unforeseen event or one without an apparent cause
anything that occurs unintentionally or by chance; chance; fortune
a misfortune or mishap, esp one causing injury or death
It would seem that the third definition is the one relied upon by the media. Interestingly, the British police stopped using the term Road Traffic Accident (RTA) some years ago; the police now refer to a Road Traffic Incident (RTI) instead.
Perhaps the media should follow the example of the police if they wish to retain their alleged reputation for truth and accuracy.
The motto of the city of Bristol is Virtute et Industria (Virtue and Industry).
However, one feature of Bristol’s local dialect is the addition of a final, intrusive ‘L’ – a so-called terminal L – to words ending in a vowel.
Consequently, area, say, becomes ‘areal‘, whilst Clifton’s Princess Victoria Street mutates into Princess Victorial Street, so Industria naturally becomes Industrial.
The terminal L is beautifully illustrated in Virtute et Industrial, a song written by Adge Cutler (posts passim), and sung here by the late Fred Wedlock.
As with elsewhere in the country, the Bristolian dialect is not as strong as it once was, mainly due to the influence of mass media and the spread of received pronunciation.
Here from a few years ago is a fine example of the local dialect delivered in song by Adge Cutler & the Wurzels many years ago at the Webbington Country Club, Loxton, Somerset.
Adge was born in Long Ashton, just outside Bristol.
OmegaT is a free and open source translation memory application written in Java. It’s a tool intended for professional translators.
OmegaT has the following features:
Fuzzy matching
Match propagation
Simultaneous processing of multiple-file projects
Simultaneous use of multiple translation memories
User glossaries with recognition of inflected forms
Document file formats include: Open Document Format (the native format of the LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Calligra office suites)
Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) XHTML and HTML MediaWiki (Wikipedia) Plain text …plus about 30 other file formats
Unicode (UTF-8) support: can be used with non-Latin alphabets
Support for right-to-left languages
Integral spelling checker
Compatible with other translation memory applications (TMX, TTX, TXML, XLIFF, SDLXLIFF)
OmegaT is cross-platform: it will run on any system on which the JRE (Java Runtime Environment) has been or can be installed.
Over on YouTube, user weasel75 has produced a short (10 minutes) tutorial on the basics of OmegaT. Hopefully you’ll find it as useful as I did.
On 1st April – April Fool’s Day – Bristol City Council’s Easton & St Philips Residents’ Parking Scheme comes into operation. (Some would consider the choice of date most apposite. Ed.)
Does Easton have one resident? Do you proof-read your signs, Bristol City Council?This is just one of many Residents’ parking schemes being introduced by the council at the instigation of the autocratic elected Mayor, George Ferguson, the man in red trousers (posts passim).
Needless to say, the schemes haven’t exactly received universal support from the residents of a city with a high level of car ownership and an abysmal level of public transport provision. Overall, it’s been condemned by residents as a ‘parking tax’ as residents will have to acquire permits, both for their own vehicles, as well as for visitors arriving by motor vehicle.
There has been consultation, of course. However, as is usual with Bristol City Council, consultation is a portmanteau word, a crafty elision of ‘confidence trick’ and ‘insult’. With a city council consultation, the stress is always firmly on the first syllable. When something goes out to consultation, what the council wants to do is usually a fait accompli.
There have been howls of protest about the Residents’ Parking Schemes in the local press, particularly the car-loving Bristol Post, which has even enlisted the odd high-profile petrolhead to trash the Mayor’s plans.
A new parking meter on Stapleton RoadAs this post is being written, the streets of Easton are being prepared for the arrival of the new parking regime. New double yellow lines and parking bays marked on the streets. In addition, there’ll be parking charges for visitors and parking meters have started to make their appearance both on main thoroughfares like Stapleton Road and the backstreets.
Bristol’s residents’ parking schemes programme is very flawed.
One of the justifications for implementing them is to dissuade the thousands of daily commuters from outside the local authority area clogging up residential roads by parking there all day. As the scheme doesn’t cover the whole city, the thousands of commuting motorists will just park a bit further out in districts not covered by residents’ parking schemes, such as the area where your ‘umble scribe happens to live.
Where I live, it’s the residents that are guilty of problem parking; the streets are Victorian, narrow and were intended for use by horse and cart, not 21st century motor vehicles. Pavement parking is rife in the backstreets, making pavements impassable to wheelchair users and parents with children in prams and pushchairs. There’s minimal enforcement to combat such anti-social parking. Indeed, the police often contribute to the problem themselves (posts passim).
If Mayor Ferguson really wanted to stop Bristol being choked by out of town commuting motorists, his counterpart in London came up with an alternative that was introduced 11 years ago. It’s called the London Congestion Charge Zone.
