facepalm | Steve Woods

Dumb Britain surfaces in Easton

02/12/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

For many years – longer than your ‘umble scribe chooses to remember – satirical magazine Private Eye has featured a column entitled Dumb Britain, which documents the hilariously wrong and ingorant answers given by contestants on television quiz shows.

However, dumbness in the form of lack of knowledge, intelligence or common-sense is not confined to the small screen; myriad examples may be found in real life, as evidenced by the photograph below taken in St Mark’s Road (note the apostrophe, Bristol City Council! Ed.) in Easton last week when the street was undergoing road works.

Maybe Private Eye should expand the criteria for Dumb Britain.
Pizza places to close in two non-existent counties

21/10/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities
According to Wikipedia, “A county is a type of officially recognized geographical division within a modern country, federal state, or province.”

Within England shires were established in the Anglo-Saxon period, shires were established as areas used for the raising of taxes and usually had a fortified town at their centre. This became known as the shire town or later the county town. In many cases, the shires were named after their shire town (for example Bedfordshire).

Middlesex is one of the thirty-nine historic counties of England. Its name is derived from its origin as a homeland for the Middle Saxons in the early Middle Ages, with the county subsequently part of that territory in the ninth or tenth century. As a county it managed to survive for the best part of a millennium, finally being abolished by the London Government Act 1963, which came into force on 1 April 1965.

The cardboard county of Avon has a rather different history to the former shire named after the home of the Middle Saxons. It was a non-metropolitan and ceremonial county in the west of England which existed between 1974 and 1996. Named after the Bristol Avon, it comprised the cities of Bath and Bristol plus parts of south Gloucestershire and Somerset, which formed the other two local authorities – Northavon and Woodspring – within the county. Avon proved to be deeply unpopular, with locals bemoaning in some instances Bristol’s loss of county status in its own right, as well as traditional affiliations to both Gloucestershire and Somerset respectively. In 1996, the county was abolished and its administrative area split between four new unitary authorities: Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire.

Although both Middlesex and Avon have officially been abolished that does not mean their use has been discontinued, usually by the uninformed. There are still organisations out there which believe Bristol is part of Avon and that the county named after the Middle Saxons still exist. One of these is currently in the news.

One of those organisations is Pizza Hut, which has announced a number of closures of its outlets in the Untied Kingdom, as reported by the Bristol Post/Live.

All told, 68 Pizza Hut restaurants will close after the company behind its the US brand’s UK venues entered administration. These include the following five outlets in the aforementioned non-existent counties, as listed by Bristol’s paper of (warped) record:
- Bristol, Avon;
- Cribbs Causeway, Avon;
- Enfield, Middlesex;
- Feltham, Middlesex; and
- Hayes, Middlesex.
A few news outlets, such as the BBC, actually took the trouble to remove the erroneous county labels instead of blindly copying and pasting the list verbatim from the original press release.

For those still in need of a junk food fix, plenty of other pizza outlets are still open to the public in both real and non-existent counties. 😀
Local rag treats bereaved like software

19/10/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

Yesterday’s Bristol Post featured a report of a man found dead at the scene of a camper van fire at the Hengrove Mounds nature reserve in south Bristol.

Reports about unexpected or unexplained deaths are not exactly uncommon fare for the local press anywhere.

However, what made this particular incident unusual was the manner in which the reporter chose to represent the subsequent action of the police after attending the incident, as quoted directly from the piece itself.

Efforts are currently ongoing to identify him in order to update his next of kin.

Update?

Use of appropriate language is just as important in writing for the local media as it is to a scientist writing a paper or an author penning a work of fiction. The poor man’s next of kin are not like software or kitchen cabinets!

For the benefit of any passing media studies graduates pretending to be journalists, you would have been told by any half-decent sub-editor that relatives and the next of kin are either notified or informed of their loved one’s untimely demise. Lumping grieving family in with software that needs a bug fix is not only very bad English indeed, but abysmal writing not worthy of being classed as journalism.
Auntie’s hardware malfunction

29/08/2025 Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities, Tech

Back on 2nd February 2004 singers Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson issued a statement attempting to explain the 38th Super Bowl half-time show controversy, during which Jackson’s right breast was exposed. In that statement the phrase wardrobe malfunction was coined.

Fast forward to August 2025 and it would appear that the nation’s quasi-state broadcaster has had what can only be described as a hardware malfunction in which the wrong sort of device was exposed.

Earlier today BBC Breakfast had a long segment about the 30th anniversary of the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system.

As this is TV there were some visual props on hand, as shown in the screenshot below.

Observant readers will have noted that the hardware used is in fact a Macintosh SE, a machine manufactured and sold by Apple between March 1987 and October 1990.

That’s right! It was discontinued five years before Windows 95 was introduced.

Furthermore, the Macintosh SE also ran on Apple’s Classic Mac OS, not MS-DOS and Windows.

In bygone times, the BBC used to brag about the accuracy and trustworthiness of its broadcasting. It still does, but that boasting appears to be on very shaky foundations indeed.

Who else likes the smell of facepalm in the morning? 😉
Ambiguity

10/07/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

The dictionary definition of ambiguity is “the fact of something having more than one possible meaning and therefore possibly causing confusion“.

Any sensible person would therefore believe that ambiguity has no place in a newspaper headline.

However, newspapers are not written nowadays by sensible people: or so it would seem.

This is exacerbated by the modern media practice of trying to cram the entire story into the headline in a condensed form, as shown by the screenshot below of this piece from the Daily Post, a title in the Reach plc stable which serves the north of Cymru.

For the benefit of passing illiterate Reach ‘journalists’, an unambiguous version of the headline would read “Prisoner with smiley face tattoo and links to North Wales on run”.

It has since been rumoured that the smiley face tattoo has been recaptured by police. 😉
BBC exclusive – bronze rusts!

17/06/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities

The BBC loves to boast about the quality of its journalism.

However, every now and again, it manages to publish an untruth so egregious and also stupid that one wonders how it gained a reputation for high class output in the first place.

To continue our story, we must travel to Nottinghamshire and the banks of the River Trent.

In April members of the police Underwater Search Team found a corroded ship’s bell during a routine training exercise and brought it ashore for a closer look, where the name Humber Prince emerged after the item was cleaned.

The bell was formerly attached to a vessel originally known as the Esso Nottingham, which was built in 1956 and subsequently re-registered as the Humber Prince in 1964 by Hull-based company by John H Whitaker Tankers, which used to ferry hydrocarbons on the river.

Photo courtesy of Nottinghamshire Police

When the BBC published its version of the story, a remarkable thing happened; the bell had turned rusty.

However, there is no mention of rust or any other metallic corrosion in Nottinghamshire Police’s original press release.

From the photos on the police press release, it is obvious that the bell is made of brass or bronze, not a ferrous metal such as iron or steel, which typically rusts as it corrodes.

Wikipedia’s page on the ship’s bell gives full details of the typical materials used.

The bell itself is usually made of brass or bronze, and normally has the ship’s name engraved or cast on it.

May I suggest that the BBC’s author writes out 100 times “Iron and steel rust. Other metals corrode!“
What a Fine fellow

15/06/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

In his 1948 dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell introduces the concept of Newspeak, a new of language, which is defined as follows, according to Wikipedia.

To meet the ideological requirements of Ingsoc (English Socialism) in Oceania, the Party created Newspeak, which is a controlled language of simplified grammar and limited vocabulary designed to limit a person’s ability for critical thinking. The Newspeak language thus limits the person’s ability to articulate and communicate abstract concepts, such as personal identity, self-expression, and free will, which are thoughtcrimes, acts of personal independence that contradict the ideological orthodoxy of Ingsoc collectivism.

Talking about a limited or non-existent ability for critical thinking, it’s time to introduce Rep. Randy Fine, the Republican Party’s representative for Florida’s 6th congressional district, in whom the capacity for critical thinking is completely lacking, as shown by his social media activity earlier in the week and the following post in particular.

Peaceful bombing, Congressman?

Yes, of course it was peaceful, Randy; there was absolutely no bloodshed and flowers bloomed where the bombs fell.

Rep. Fine’s Wikipedia entry also reveals he is an Islamophobe, racist, gun rights supporter, cheerleader for the genocidal Israeli state (he called Ireland antisemitic for its recognition of Palestine in 2024. Ed.) and, last but not least, homophobic.

Randy Fine reminds your correspondent of another very pertinent quotation from Orwell’s novel, i.e.:

War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Have a nice day!
Grammer, AI style

12/06/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Tech

From your ‘umble scribe’s social media timeline.

We all occasionally need help with English grammar, even we pensioners who have spent decades working at linguists, but the above ‘suggestion‘ from Grammarly could be diplomatically described as unhelpful.

According to Wikipedia, “Grammarly is an American English language writing assistant software tool. It reviews the spelling, grammar, and tone of a piece of writing“, as well as being a tool for detecting plagiarism.

On its own website, Grammarly is described as ‘Grammarly, the trusted AI assistant for everyday communication‘.

On the basis of the above howler, your correspondent would not trust it to write out the alphabet in the correct sequence.
For UK, see England

02/06/2025 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Ever since Æthelstan became King of the English in 927 CE, some in England – starting with Æthelstan himself – have had difficulty recognising where England ended and the rest of the world began. Indeed Æthelstan meddled so much in the land of the Scots that they allegedly nicknamed him “The Bastard“.

Given the dominance of England within the Untied Kingdom, this has persisted down through the centuries that separate the present from the days of Ælfred of Wessex‘s grandson.

The latest manifestation of this Englandshire = the entire UK occurs in yesterday’s online edition of Bristol ‘Live’, the city’s unfortunate newspaper of warped record, which managed to defy both demographics and geography in one awful little puff piece masquerading as “news“.
A screenshot of the headline of the offending article is offered below.

Although Wells is described in the piece as “England’s smallest city“, there is no empirical evidence provided of its lack of size. Your ‘umble scribe used a little-known research technique called using a search engine to provide an answer; in this case 5 seconds’ work gave a census population figure of 12,000 for Wells.

However, Wells is not the Untied Kingdom’s smallest cathedral city. Cymru has two cathedral cities that together have a combined population of well under Wells’ 12,000 souls. First of all there’s Llanelwy/St Asaph (pop. 3,485) and Tyddewi/St Davids (pop. 1,751), which is actually the UK’s smallest cathedral city in terms of number of residents.

Your correspondent is surprised that today’s ‘journalists’ are not familiar with this research technique he often uses, which is recommended they use as a matter of course. 😀
Liability lost in translation

16/01/2025 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media

As this blog has pointed out previously (posts passim), it is not unusual for bilingual signage to have text that tells the speakers of one language one thing and those of the other language something completely different.

The bad advice given can cover such varied topics as how far one has to travel to legal liability for loss of or damage to private property.

The latter is the subject of a photograph which appeared in your ‘umble scribe’s social media feed this morning and concerns legal liability at an unknown railway station operated by Trafnidiaeth Cymru, also known as Transport for Wales.

In translation, the Welsh text on the sign reads:

You can leave your bike here for free, but at your own risk

On the other hand, the English text reads:

Bicycles may be left here free of charge but at our risk

Judging by the patina on the sign, it’s been there a long time and somebody has yet to take the railway company to court to determine exactly where legal liability lies given the sign’s bilingual ambiguity.

Your correspondent wonders how many of these confusing signs have been installed across Cymru.

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