And the next letter is...

The pub I was in last night has a couple of boards where the beer menu is written up in chalk. Of course the names are also on the pumps, usually on properly printed labels but occasionally on hand written ones. I decided to have an American Pale Ale. On one board it said "Amrcn" on the other board it said "Amricn" and on the pump it said "Amrican". Surely it can't be that hard a word to get right.

Headline of the year?

In yesterday's Metro.

Medicine made me into cross-dressing sex-mad gambler


Gets my vote for headline of the year.

Apostrophe's

I was in Wolverhampton today where I passed a shop selling discounted ex-catalogue electrical goods. Under the name of the shop, in large bold letters were the words

The shop that defie's the credit crunch.

I am constantly amazed that there seem to be people out there who believe that every word that ends with "s" must have an apostrophe.

The Apprentice

The fired candidate in last night's Apprentice had her own unique approach to language - peppering her conversation with such words as "comfortability", "conversate", "manoeuvrement", "professionality" and "teamly".

My favourite, though, was after she was fired. She clearly felt that the others had been ganging up against her when she said, "Karmically they'll be retributed."

How to undermine your arguement

One of my students came to me the other day with an impassioned plea to transfer her to a higher level class. She was, she told me, not happy to be with such low level students. I resisted the entreaties. I know my job and my class and she isn't, by quite a long way, the strongest in the group. Before she went away, still unhappy with the situation, she handed me last week's homework.

When I marked it I found, among other interesting sentences

"Somalia has own camel but England don't had got."

Pity, I'll bet a camel would come in handy.

QES Demolition Derby

I don't usually make posts that just link to other people's blogs but I'm going to make an exception. I was intending to write my own demolition of the arrant nonsense that forms the bulk of the Queen's English Society website but my minimal research has revealed that others have already done a fairly thorough job.

So here are some of them.

Linguism

Sentence First

John E McIntyre

Inky Fool

Bad Linguistics

We can only hope, as Plain Text suggests, that the whole thing is a spoof. Sadly, I'm pretty sure that it isn't.

Mixed messages in pedantry

The Times today has a news article and a leader about the Queen's English Society's proposal for an academy to police the English language and guard against its decline. The messages seem a little mixed, though. On the one hand they have given the leader the sub-headline "An academy for the English language is a bad idea" and  describe the suggestion as "forlorn". They point out that an academy would have no actual effect on how people use the language, just as French pedants' criticism has not stopped anyone there using le weekend. But at the same time they suggest that the loss of the "original meaning" of beg the question or protest one's innocence* has been for no good reason

The news item is a little more factual, restricting itself, by and large, to reporting the comments from members of the aforementioned society. These comments also have something of a schizophrenic sound about them. They suggest that "[Language academies]...do not stop the language changing...but they do provide a measure of linguistic discipline and try to retain valid and useful changes new terms while rejecting passing fads."  They say we "desperately need" such a body because of "the tragic failure" of our education system.

The brains behind the formation of this academy is Martin Estinel who, if the article is accurate, has the usual plethora of personal language foibles. He doesn't like "gay" in its modern sense but accepts that the dictionaries include it. (Good of him to accept such an obviously verifiable fact!). He doesn't like misplaced sentence stress (although it isn't clear what he means by that - perhaps he's objecting to rising intonations in non-questions although that isn't actually a matter of stress at all.) He objects to teenagers using "like", the confusion of "last" and "past", and the tendency to use "if I was" instead of "if I were".

Rhea Williams, described as chairman of the Society, is also quoted. She objects to "we was" instead of "we were" and if she was (sic) talking about in formal writing, I'd agree, but she says "for example, you hear, 'we was' a lot." Indeed you do, and have done for centuries, it depends where you live. It's by far the commonest spoken form in my locality. She also says that there are "mispronunciations and misunderstandings galore" but fails to suggest any. That's probably because there are far fewer than she thinks. Even if people do all the things that she, and so many others, object to, understanding still usually occurs.

The case against an academy is bizarrely presented by Jack Bovill, chairman of the Spelling Society. And I mean "bizarrely presented" as it ignores the issue of an academy more or less entirely to promote his society's view that "awareness of irregularities in spelling" needs to be raised and that while language adapts we should "do it deliberately" rather than "leave it to chance".

My view is that if they want their academy, let them have it. Give them a hall to hold their meetings in. Let them grumble and moan about the declining standards and the end of civilization as we know it. It won't make a blind bit of difference to how real people speak or write.


(* Incidentally I'm not sure what "original meaning" they are talking about in the case of "protest one's innocence".)

Headline Part 2

And today's headline in the same newspaper is the understated

I SAW CROSSBOW CANNIBAL EAT LIVE RAT

Just gotta love the journalistic restraint.

And this year's winner is...

It's exam marking time again.
The topic is writing a letter for a job application.

One student's attempts at describing her personal qualities are definitely in the running to win this year's award for the most bizarre mistake. She is, apparently, "physically friendly and thrustworthy".

Headline

A standard short task we use in teaching higher ESOL levels is to provide newspaper headlines and get the students to try to predict from the headline what the content of the article would be.
I wonder what they would make of today's Sun front page.

UNI BOFFIN QUIZZED ON CROSSBOW CANNIBAL KILLINGS

Those pesky dangling modifiers

Heard on the news tonight, "Doctors missed the problem that could have killed him three times."

Singular!

From the very same shop that brought you this, today another window-sized poster.

Nike Woven Pant

Half Price

Maximum two per customer

I've never seen a singular pant but, as it's less than the maximum, I'm tempted to go in and ask for one.

Never a truer word...

It's exam marking time again and as ever it is throwing up its fair share of amusing moments. The exam topic is "getting a job" and includes a mock interview. My favourite line so far is

Teacher (as the interviewer): So, tell me about your personal qualities.

Student (as the applicant): I am hard work.

Never a truer word lad, never a truer word.

Sinister

In the news in the last couple of days has been an item about hospitals which received good reports in their last inspections which have nevertheless drawn complaints from patients and patients' groups for being dirty and blood-splattered.
This morning on television Baroness Young of the Care Quality Commission said

"We're disappointed that the Patients' Association won't tell us which hospitals and which patients [have complained] so that we can take action on them."

I'm sure it wasn't meant to sound as sinister as it did.

Er... run that past me again

Just heard on the news, in a report about two patients who have a Tamiflu resistant strain of Swine Flu:

"It is believed they caught the virus from each other."

How is that possible?

An odd thing to say

John Moffat has brought to my attention an odd phrasing in the Guardian's reporting of the tragic death of PC Barker in the recent flooding in Cumbria. The police officer was swept away as he tried to direct traffic away from a dangerous bridge. According to the Guardian, "The policeman's body, still in uniform, was found washed up on a beach ."
Does the use of "still in uniform" strike anyone apart from us as being a little odd. Why would the body be anything but "still in uniform"? Would we expect the uniform to have washed away? Would we have expected an on duty officer to be not in uniform? Why mention the uniform at all?

It seems to me, as it did to John, to be a strange thing to say.

Signs of the times

I noticed two signs in Birmingham as I was walking to the station tonight which amused me for different reasons. The first was a large advert for Ozzy Osborne's autobiography. The title of the book is "I am Ozzy". The sign was a large picture of Ozzy with the text, reproduced exactly below, punctuated as shown.

I am Ozzy. This is his story. Read it now.

This seems to be a rather schizophrenic phrasing with the "I" in the first sentence and the "his" in the second. Had the first sentence been enclosed in quotes to make it a title, I'd have accepted it, but as it is the sense is very confused.

The second sign was a small poster in the newsagents, near the chocolate shelf. It was an advert for Terry's chocolate orange. The only problem was that the apostrophe in "Terry's" had been replaced with one of those squares that display on your computer when the font you are using doesn't include that symbol. Most likely, what has happened is that the designer has used an unusual font and when the advert has gone to its computerised print that font wasn't available and it's substituted the square. What baffles me is how it ever went to print that way. Did nobody at all notice this odd character appearing? Did they notice and not care? Did they notice and care but think, "Oh bugger, nobody will notice"?

Beware hubris

The Sun, a newspaper that made such a big issue out of a few trivial spelling mistakes in Gordon Brown's letter of condolence to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan, managed to spell the family name wrong themselves on their web-site.

Of course, in their view, a correction and a brief apology is sufficient when they do it but the PM must be dragged over hot coals when he does it.

Still, could happen to anyone, couldn't it lads? Quite.

Powerful man has poor handwriting, shock!

There is a great deal of fuss being made over Gordon Brown's letter of condolence to the family of a soldier killed in Afghanistan. So the Prime Minister has poor handwriting, what a shock. He is also blind in one eye and partially blind in the other which probably has an effect on his neatness. He has now apologised but just how bad, in reality, was that letter?

Let's look at the errors that the newspaper is making such a big thing of.

First of all he has written "Dear Mrs James" rather than "Dear Mrs Janes". OK, it's a good idea to get somebody else to proofread, especially when writing something this sensitive but the truth is that "James" is a far more common name than "Janes". I'm sure that he was aware of the correct spelling but the mistaken substitution of a common spelling for an uncommon one is surely understandable? It's a mistake that anyone could make.

The second problem is that there is an obvious correction that has been made to the dead soldiers first name "Jamie" where the last letter has been written incorrectly and then gone over to correct it. Perhaps it would have been better to start the whole thing again, on the other hand I think most people would probably do the same.

There are several spelling errors. Or are there? Condolences is written as condolencs, greatest as greatst and colleagues as colleagus. This is actually the same error three times- the omission of an "e". I'm perfectly sure that the Prime Minister can spell all of these words correctly, this is an error of haste rather than of spelling. I have similar problems sometimes when I'm typing - mistakes that I only notice when I read it back (or more commonly half a second after hitting send). I also have a regular failing where I am too slow in taking my finger from the caps key so that I have two initial capitals on sentences. I pick these things up (sometimes) in proofreading but the Prime Minister may well find that harder to do because of his eyesight. I'd find it impossible without my glasses.

What else is there? There's a you instead of your and, allegedly a securiity instead of security. I've looked at the letter and I'm not so sure it isn't just his handwriting again in the latter case, and the former is again a fairly common error of haste.

The final thing is perhaps the silliest criticism of all. He has signed off with "My sincere condolences, Yours sincerely, Gordon Brown". The complaint is the repetition of "sincere". What's so terrible about that?

As I said, Gordon Brown has apologised. He is said to be mortified that he has given offence. But does he really have any great cause for such feelings? I'd say not. He's written a letter that has a few mistakes in it. Maybe it does look as if it was overly hasty but I don't know, and nor does anyone else, where he was and what else was happening when he wrote it. The errors are the sort that anyone might make. I'm no fan of Gordon Brown but frankly I think he should be criticised when he deserves it, not when he doesn't. This elaborate nit-picking of his letter looks to me to be targeted solely because it's him.

And I can't believe I'm defending Gordon Brown!

Fire !

An email received today about a fire drill that took place this morning,

The alarms are tested every Wednesday at 9:00 am for a duration of 10 to 15 seconds. If the alarm is continuous, this is a real fire drill.

I wonder what the sound is if it's a real fire rather than a real fire drill.