Category: Communication

Small things which have mildly annoyed me today

On By Laura MorganIn Communication, Language

1. The use of the phrase “From whence…” in The Suspicions of Mr Whicher. From where, or whence. Not an illiterate combination of the two. It irritates me when highly-praised books have small and obvious errors in them (though so far I’m afraid I’m also failing to see why this one has had any praise at all. It’s all very well having a fantastic story to tell, but – call me old-fashioned – I still think that for it to be a success you also need to be able to write).

2. A mockup of a web page in which the designer had used the following sample text:

Lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum lorem ipsum

Lorem ipsum is a nonsense language which you use when you’re designing web (or printed) pages so that you can see how they will look with text in them. The WHOLE POINT is that it replicates the effect of actual words, because it contains strings of different lengths. Google it and you’ll find it’s freely and abundantly available on the internet. It looks like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nam pretium magna at odio. Praesent velit. Fusce accumsan turpis. Mauris orci turpis, fringilla vitae, blandit nec, tempus sed, nisi. Sed vitae ligula.

In the example above all the designer has done is demonstrate that he has no idea what he’s doing. I admit that this might annoy me less if he were someone whom I thought had any idea what he was doing the rest of the time.

One day, when I am in charge of the internet and all book publishing, everything will work better. In the meantime I will stoically continue to correct errors of omission, oversight and stupidity, free of charge. You’re welcome.

Merde!

On By Laura MorganIn Language2 Comments

Swearing alert

I’ve just spent a week in the south of France, in a tiny attic apartment with a doddery old TV on which we could, with careful angling of the arial, receive three separate channels.  We watched quite a lot of films; some made in French, others dubbed from English (including an exceptionally silly Clint Eastwood film which I now discover is called Absolute Power and which I urge you to seek out at the first opportunity).

Anyway, the main fact I took away from watching French films was that the French use merde like the English use fuck, which is to say in every context and part of speech imaginable.  Where we have fucking, fucked, fuckwit, fucker and other variations (I’m sure you can think of some of your own), the French have more incarnations of merde than I’d ever suspected.  My favourite is the verb “enmerder” – literally, “to beshitten”, which I think we should adapt into English immediately.

Georgia

On By Laura MorganIn Language

I’ve just stumbled across this explanation of why a US state and an ex-USSR country have the same name in English.  It’s all very interesting, but it also says:

In their native tongue, Georgians refer to themselves as the Kartveli and to their country as Sakartvelo.

Which surprises me, because every Georgian man I’ve ever met has been called George, which I assumed was some sort of patriotic gesture.  But if Georgians don’t call it Georgia, perhaps they just really like the name?  I shall have to ask somebody Georgian.

Edit: I guess this might have something to do with it:

Saint George is a patron saint of Georgia. According to Georgian author Enriko Gabisashvili, Saint George is most venerated in the nation of Georgia.

Naming conventions

On By Laura MorganIn Language

Yesterday’s Sun, which I read over someone’s shoulder on the tube (she hastens to add), had a picture of Sienna Miller and Balthazar Getty getting up to no good on a beach.  All well and good, except the picture was captioned “Sienna and Getty”.  I suppose a weak defence could plead that “Miller” is not enough alone to identify the lovely Sienna, and that (a) Balthazar is not famous enough to get just a first name and (b) the point of the story, from the Sun’s point of view at least, is that LOVE RAT GETTY is a Getty, and therefore a likely multimillionaire.

But I think they do the public a disservice if they think we wouldn’t know who they meant by either “Sienna and Balthazar” or “Miller and Getty”.  By “the public” I mean “people (of whom I am one) who read the gossip columns”, naturally.

A trickier version of the same question is posed by a photo in the Metro earlier in the week of John Terry with a small schoolboy, who I think had had heart surgery and was being rewarded by a meeting with his footballing hero.  Now, nobody would ever refer to John Terry as “John”, but equally you can’t call a small boy – whose name I have forgotten but whom for convenience we’ll call Jack Robinson – as “Robinson”.  So the caption was “Terry and Jack”, which is probably the best they could have done, but still jars a little for me.

I think we should have a rule whereby everybody has to be referred to by their full name at all times.

Translation

On By Laura MorganIn Language

I don’t speak any German, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding this message, which appeared when I was trying to reach a page on a German site:

Dokument nicht gefunden

I like languages which are so close to English you can translate them without knowing any words. Once, at school, we were asked to translate a page of Dutch, and of course we all panicked because we didn’t know any Dutch, and then we read the page and it was full of sentences like “Santa Claus ist un olden menn met un lang witt bard”.

Fear of terror

On By Laura MorganIn Language

Listening to the radio this morning, I came to the conclusion that there are some words which should be banned from news reporting. “Terror” instead of “terrorism” is the obvious one – it’s pointless and it leads to nonsensical coinages like the one above, which I have seen more than once.

But there are others which are just lazy. The one which raised my ire earlier was a reference to the “fuel crisis” which, at this stage, barely even counts as a crisis for the people it’s happening to, let alone the rest of us. Then the increasingly belligerent John Humphrys, in a conversation with David Cameron (for whom I have no love) during which Cameron barely edged a word in, used the word “fiasco” to refer to an event so unfiascolike (what? it’s a word) that I can’t even remember what it was.

I propose a ban on lazy clichés in news reporting. No crises, no fiascos, no terror. The only exception should be use of the suffix “-gate” to describe a faintly scandalous occurence, which should be made compulsory where the location of the event already ends in “gate”. I want to see a story about Tessa Jowell roaming around SE14 dressed in combat gear and waving an Uzi described as “New Cross Gategate”.

More caps

On By Laura MorganIn Language

There is, of course, a long tradition of unnecessary capitalisation.  A bus just drove past with an advert on the side, and the advert said:

JESUS said: When the Son of Man comes, will He find Faith on the Earth?

I understand why everything is capped up, but it makes it very difficult to read.

Selhurst Park

On By Laura MorganIn Football, Language

Good news: apparently Simon Jordan has secured the lease on Selhurst Park for another 25 years.

Bad news: he still wants to move the club elsewhere, according to this article from the BBC:

“I’d like to see Palace move away from Selhurst Park, I’d like to stay in the Borough and I’d like us to move to a stadium which is more befitting of the ambitions we have for the club.”

In which “Borough”, I wonder? I guess he means Croydon, since that’s where they are now. I’d like to see them move back to Crystal Palace proper, although there’s not an obvious spot, unless they pull down the athletics stadium and start again.

I’d also like to see fewer random capitalisations, beginning with that “B”.

No congestion charge for NYC

On By Laura MorganIn Language, Public transport3 Comments

Inhabitat carries the depressing news that the proposal to introduce congestion charging (or “congestion pricing”, as it seems to be called over there) in New York has been voted down. Their headline says all that need be said, I think.

Stupid car-driving voters. If ever a city was designed for walking, New York is it. But perhaps expecting brave and innovative steps from legislators in a country so wedded to car ownership was too much.

Still, I was mildly cheered by the reference in the article to “neigh sayers”. If they’re getting horses to vote on transport policy they’re in a bigger mess than I thought.