This blog has often drawn attention to the inability of modern journalists (or should that be media employees? Ed.) to understand ambiguity, i.e. the quality of a statement being open to more than one interpretation, and how to avoid it by using language as a precision, not a blunt instrument.
The example below dates back to 2022, comes from India’s Republic and dives beneath the waves to the bottom of the sea. It arrived in your ‘umble scribe’s social medial timeline late last week, so apologies if you’ve already seen the howler below.
The story was originally published in The Guardian. Republic’s reporter Anwesha Majumdar does not disclose in the rewrite why aquatic life in the deep oceans is using robots.
Whitehall SW1 and the rest of the Untied Kingdom* are saddled with the Tories until unelected pretend prime minister Rishi Sunak decides he’s had enough of ministerial limousines and borrowing other people’s private aircraft and finally decides to call a general election.
After the original, fascist and Tory Lite versions, the latest iteration of this well-known internet meme – the VR version – has just appeared in your ‘umble scribe’s social media timeline.
A quick reverse image search with the excellent TinEye browser plug-in reveals that this latest variant of the original image started appearing online about two months ago in February 2024.
Your ‘umble scribe is spending a few days beyond the confines of HM Open Prison United Kingdom staying with family in the Campo de Gibraltar. It’s his first time in the country for a few decades and a good chance to brush up on rusty spoken Spanish, as well as get some much-needed sun after a long, wet English winter.
Being out in the countryside, your correspondent has been amazed by the local birdlife, which features species that are never or rarely seen back home.
Firstly, let’s introduce the biggest of the local avian species, the Eurasian Griffon Vulture. These are described by my trusty half a century old Collins bird book as having a flight outline like a “tea tray in the sky“, stand as high as 1.22 metres high and have a wingspan up to 2.8 metres.
They are spotted throughout the day on the crags behind the house, as well as riding the thermals in large flocks.
Three vultures perched on crags. Very easy photographic subjects at rest, but testing the phone camera’s technical limits.
It’s rather difficult to get a decent photo of them on a phone, so here’s a close-up from elsewhere.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
The other 2 very impressive local birds are more colourful but slightly smaller: the golden oriole and the European bee-eater respectively.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Orioles are truly spectacular, flitting across the valley in a flash of gold and black. Although they do migrate to Britain, their distribution is rather limited, whilst your ‘umble scribe had four sightings in a couple of hours one afternoon.
Where the oriole impresses with its two-tone plumage, the bea-eater has colourful plumage reminiscent of a member of a 1970s psychedelic rock band.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
These birds are not regular migrants to Britain, but have bred on several occasions in recent years, according to the RSPB. Down in southern Spain, it can sound as if there’s one in just about every shrub at times!
Within minutes of each other, two occurrences reminded your ‘umble scribe of the importance of proofreading, i.e. the process of finding and correcting mistakes in text before it is printed out or posted online.
If nothing else, it proves the person or company involves knows what it’s doing and writing, providing evidence of professional competence
The first was spotted on a change machine in Terminal 1 of Manchester Airport in the early hours of this morning.
SPECIMAN? What’s one of those?
According to Wikipedia, a specimen – not SPECIMAN – banknote is printed generally in very limited quantities for distribution to central banks to aid in the recognition of banknotes from a country other than their own. Furthermore, To avoid use of specimen banknotes as legal tender notes, the banknotes are deformed, typically by being overprinted and/or punched (perfin) with an inscription such as “SPECIMEN”, “SPECIMEN NO VALUE”, “CANCELLED” or the equivalent in one or more other languages.
The second turned up a couple of minutes later on your correspondent’s social media feed.
Should those with a poor grasp of English be gaoled?
A reverse image search reveals that the original image first emerged on social media some 4 years ago and originated in the United States. Note that the snack is accurately defined as having caramelized onion relish its long description. Y’all have a good misspelt sandwich now! 😀
British supermarket chain Asda is well known for the lime green livery of its grocery delivery vans, as per the photograph below.
Photo credit: Asda
However, there is now a serious rival to Asda’s dominance of the lime green delivery van sector. The vehicle below was spotted last week outside the Chelsea Inn at the junction of Chelsea Road and Bloy Street in Bristol’s Easton area.
Both Asda and Asbo are acronyms, i.e. abbreviations formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word. Asda is a truncated version of the first part of its original name of Associated Dairies and Farm Stores , whilst Asbo denotes an Anti-Social Behaviour Order, a past form of sanction for naughty boys and girls which has now been replaced by two penalties – the Community Protection Order (CPO) and the Criminal Behaviour Order (CBO).
Note that the Asbo van is parked on the footway (which some refer to as the pavement (posts passim). Ed.); how apposite! 😀
In recent days, pastry products purveyor Greggs suffered an IT outage that left shops unable to process certain types of payment, the BBC reported yesterday. The company has over 2,000 branches and employs 21,500 persons.
Some shops were forced to close and posted notices saying they were closed for the day or could only accept certain payment types. Fans of hot pastry-based snacks took to social media, with some labelling it as bordering on a national emergency. One of the more interesting signs from an unidentified branch of Greggs is shown below.
Yes, you did read that correctly: “Due to a system outage, we are CARD ONLY temporarily and our staff cant do math“.
A system outage is not the only woe to beset this particular branch of Greggs. First of all, there’s a punctuation thief about, unless the staff cant is hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature from employees. Secondly, what is this math? Mathematics, the knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes, is abbreviated differently by speakers of British and American English; the former with maths, the latter with math, as in the well-known US phrase, (you) do the math.
Fears of the creeping Americanisation of British English have been doing the rounds for about a century already, but are becoming more prevalent due to the pervasiveness of US culture and a general lack of awareness of the distinctions between the two dialects. For instance, your ‘umble scribe would call something that ran his laptop a program, whilst something broadcast on the radio or TV would be a programme: some folk – quite possibly younger – would use program without distinction for both.
There’s a Roman road that runs across Durdham Down in the Clifton area of Bristol.
However, it’s not the one near the top of Blackboy Hill with the modern name plate and the posh BS9 postcode. That ‘Roman’ road is an imposter, albeit a short but straight one.
There is a real Roman road that crosses Durdham Down, but it’s much harder to spot on the ground since it consists of just the agger, the raised bank upon which the road was laid and its two accompanying side ditches. Your ‘umble scribe actually had to lie on the ground to spot it, as the lumps and bumps on the ground can be measured in mere centimetres. The sharp-eyed may be able to discern the differences between the agger and side ditches in the photograph below.
It’s somewhat easier to spot on a Lidar scan of the area. It can be seen in the 2 faint parallel lines depicting the ditches on either side of the agger, which are enclosed by the red ellipse in the photo below.
This section of Roman highway is a scheduled monument. Its official listing reads as follows.
The monument includes part of the Roman road which originally ran from Bath to Sea Mills, situated on a wide plateau known as Durdham Down. The road survives as a length of flat-topped bank measuring approximately 100m long, 10m wide and 0.6m high with a visible although largely buried ditch on the south side.
The Sea Mills mentioned above is a modern-ish suburb of Bristol. It was, however, also home to the Romans who established a settlement called Portus Abonae there. From Portus Abonae, travellers on the road would have had to take to water to continue their onward
In between the surviving section on the Downs and Portus Abonae, part of the original Roman road’s alignment is still in use today, its course being followed by the current Mariner’s Drive/Mariner’s Lane.
The map below shows how this Roman Road, known as the Via Julia, fitted into the general system of roads in Rome’s province of Britannia.
Along with water, food is one of the essentials of life.
Another of life’s essentials is language; it’s vital for communication and communal living in a social species such as ourselves.
One of the elements of language is the adage, generally defined as something which people often say and which expresses a general truth about some aspect of life.
In English one well-known adage is there’s many a true word spoken in jest, a propos of which the screenshot below turned up today in my social media feed.
According to Wikipedia, “Distracted boyfriend is an Internet meme based on a 2015 stock photograph by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem. Social media users started using the image as a meme at the start of 2017, and it went viral in August 2017 as a way to depict different forms of disloyalty. The meme has inspired various spin-offs and received critical acclaim.”
Copyright on original: Antonio Guillem. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In recent days, pastry products purveyor Greggs suffered an IT outage that left shops unable to process certain types of payment, 
There’s a Roman road that runs across 
