Language

  • New abbreviation in the wild

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    Ever since it was first coined in 2002, the online world has benefited from the creation of the slang abbreviation TL;DR, i.e. too long; don’t read, indicating that a body of text is not worth one’s while to read.

    The abbreviation is used in both upper and lower case versions.

    As the Wikipedia entry states, ‘TL;DR is commonly used in online discussions, comment sections, and social media posts. Writers often employ the acronym to summarize a preceding lengthy text, allowing readers who prefer brevity to quickly understand the main point. Conversely, readers might use TL;DR as a critique, signaling that a text was excessively verbose or lacked clarity‘.

    Official recognition of the abbreviation came some 11 years after its first appearance, as Wikipedia explains.

    In August 2013, TL;DR was officially added to Oxford Dictionaries Online, recognizing its widespread use in digital communications. Merriam-Webster also documented the term, noting its establishment as part of modern digital lexicon.

    Human brain made out of electrical circuits denoting artificial intelligence. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.TL;DR has now been joined by another new slang abbreviation, AI:DR. This denotes that the text in question has been produced by generative AI, that environmentally costly means of producing low quality output (affectionately known as slop. Ed.) without human intervention.

    There is already speculation that AI is being deployed in regional newspaper offices in titles owned by Reach plc, but that would prove difficult to verify as the quality of their content starts from a very low base anyway. 😀

    Your correspondent trusts that readers and the wider public will not be shy in using this new abbreviation accordingly.

  • For UK read England (and English)

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

    On Monday the country’s best known toolmaker’s son ‘Sir’ Keir Rodney Starmer, in a vain effort to stem the flow of support for the Farage fascist fan club otherwise known as the Reform Party UK Ltd., made a major announcement on immigration racism and xenophobia, namely to the effect that he was in favour of both, despite a side serving of the usual ‘I’m not racist, but…‘

    His speech met generally with condemnation from the left and varying degrees of praise from those on the right, such as ‘Honest’ Bob Jenrick, some of whom also believed he hadn’t gone far enough to be beastly to those pesky forrins to whom they would have been even nastier.

    Anyway, this was a speech in which Starmer embraced his inner Enoch Powell, echoing phrases from the latter’s notorious and deeply offensive ‘Rivers of blood‘ speech from 2nd April 1968. Where Powell remarked that the country’s white population ‘found themselves made strangers in their own country‘, Starmer stated that the UK risked becoming an ‘island of strangers‘.

    Another ill-conceived utterance in his speech was that immigration and immigrants had done ‘incalculable harm‘ to the country. In particular, this drew justifiable ire from many whose grandparents or great-grandparents had migrated to Britain in the 19th and 20th centuries along the lines of ‘how dare he…‘. This reaction from tax campaigner Richard Murphy is a prime example of this sentiment.

    Quite right, Richard. They come over here and do irreparable harm by (say) keeping the National Health Service running, paying their taxes and so on.

    Another facet of the toolmaker’s son’s speech centred on his remarks about the use of the English language. Starmer is on record as saying:

    Britain is an inclusive and tolerant country, but the public expect that people who come here should be expected to learn the language and integrate.

    A remark of a similar nature and of the same import was also made on Starmer’s social media account.

    Which language? Starmer is conflating English, the language of England with the whole of the Untied* Kingdom, parts of which have their own indigenous languages, like Cymraeg or Gaelic. He seems completely ignorant of the fact that modern English is the product of three waves of historical incomers, i.e. immigrants, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc. who arrived after the Romans left in the 5th century CE, Norse Vikings who settled here and the French-speaking Vikings from Normandy who invaded in 1066. There are very few words from Britain’s indigenous languages in modern English.

    The fact that modern English is a mongrel language brought by immigrants also seems lost on Starmer.

    However, this imperative to speak English has not gone down well in either Scotland or Cymru (where Cymraeg has equal legal status with the language of invasion. Ed.), as The National reports.

    In Cymru, the radio personality, TV presenter and influencer Jessica Davies took to X/Twitter to make her feelings known.

    Starmer's original post reads If you want to live in the UK, you should speak English. That’s common sense. So we're raising English language requirements across every main immigration route. Jessica Davies responds with If you live in Wales you should speak Welsh. Or are we not doing that?

    Well done, Keir. By your racism you have shown that you are well and truly a product of your father’s profession.

    * = Misspelling is deliberate.

  • Generative AI art – the ultimate comment

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media, Tech

    The photograph below showed up in your ‘umble scribe’s social media feed today and is the best comment he has seen to date in respect of the so-called “AI slop” (or just plain “slop”. Ed.) produced by generative AI engines.

    Message reads Say no to generative AI art. Buy art from a real degenerate.

    However, your ‘umble scribe is not the only person who questions the utility of generative AI, let alone its accuracy and/or faithfulness. Here’s the historian Dan Snow of History Hit clearly suffering from the output of generative AI in respect of great events in world history Whoever would have guessed the USA had ships in the thick of the Battle of Trafalgar? :-D.

  • Another Bristol Live exclusive

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics, Social Media

    Another day, other news.

    Your ‘umble scribe awoke this morning to hear that Pope Francis, head of the Roman Catholic church, had died aged 88 years.

    In a situation eerily reminiscent of the demise of Mrs Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Mountbatten-Windsor in September 2022, when she had been visited just two days beforehand by a certain Mary Elizabeth Truss, the pontiff’s death comes very shortly after an audience with a certain James David Vance, who has been appointed to preside over vice by the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump.

    Social media has been awash this morning with posts about the similarities between the two deaths

    However, all this speculation is pointless, as is any explanation that the pope was a very ill man.

    For the real reason for the passing of the pontiff, one has to consult Bristol ‘Live’, the West Country’s newspaper of (warped) record.

    Under the Bristol News header, this Reach plc title seems to have an exclusive scoop at to what or who was actually liable for Francis’ demise – West Country folk reacting.

    Screenshot from Bristol Live website showing article filed under Bristol News with the headline Pope Francis dies as South West reacts.

    Now look what you’ve done, Bristolians and neighbours!

    Unless, of course, it’s yet another example of bad English usage and even worse journalism of the putting the cart before the horse variety.

  • The new British invasion

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    One of my regular weekly listens is The Coffee Klatch presented by former US Secretary of Labor Robert Reich and Heather Lofthouse of Inequality Media.

    A screen capture from the latest Coffee Klatch episode with Heather Lofthouse and Robert Reich

    Bob’s and Heather’s are two of the few voices of sanity I hear coming across the Atlantic from a country where the head of state wants to Make America Grate Again (or something like it. Ed.) when he’s not on the golf course.

    However, what has surprised me in the last two weeks is Mr Reich’s increasingly regular use of British English vocabulary.

    Yesterday, for instance, he used the rude and informal term shite to describe one of the authoritarian Trump regime’s latest outrages, whilst the week before he defined another as bonkers.

    We’ll return to bonkers later.

    However, it seems your ‘umble scribe is not the only one to have noticed British English. Yesterday’s Guardian drew attention to the increasing use of British English terms in the USA, particularly amongst the young.

    It states:

    The most common was bonkers, meaning “absurd”, which was applied to topics from politics to sports to internet trends, according to the language learning platform Babbel.

    The rest of the Top Ten Briticisms are:

    • Amongst, rather than “among”;
    • Queue, as opposed to “line”;
    • Wonky;
    • Cheeky;
    • Snarky;
    • Cheers, in the context of thanking someone;
    • Keen, i.e. enthusiastic;
    • Maths instead math; and finally
    • Nil.

    The piece notes that this phenomenon is partly fuelled by British musicians such as Charli xcx, as well as newspapers such as the Grauniad creating US editions, as well as general “global culturization“.

    However, if your correspondent were to pick holes in the piece, it would be with the following assertion:

    In addition to the list of words, researchers examined the demographics of the speakers. They found that the use of “bonkers” is most common among gen Z, whose members accounted for 77% of uses in the database. People aged 66 and older didn’t use it at all. Meanwhile, 90% of “bonkers” speakers were women, and 97% lived in urban areas.

    Mr Reich, like your ‘umble scribe, is over 66 and therefore incapable of using vocabulary such as bonkers according to the academic researchers quoted.

    In case Mr Reich happens to read this, corrections and clarifications can be submitted to the paper should you so wish. 😀

  • The Felon’s thought police

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    image of George OrwellIn 1948 an old Etonian then living of the Scottish island of Jura wrote a novel about future authoritarian dystopia.

    The novel was written as a warning, although in recent decades even allegedly democratic governments seem to have used it more as a manual to control what their citizens not only do, but also think.

    The novel is, of course, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the main method of mind control was via the so-called thought police.
    Nothing is efficient in Oceania except the Thought Police.

    Along with the Thought Police, Orwell also developed the idea of thoughtcrime, i.e. the offence of thinking in ways not approved by the ruling regime.

    Moving forward from 1948 to 2025 and the presence of the state’s thought police is very apparent, particularly at present in the United States of America under the regime of the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump, who has a mission to Make America Grate Again (or something similar. Ed.).

    The Felon’s thought police have been particularly active, expunging DEI policies.

    However, the thought police have also been active in the far-flung reaches of Uncle Sam’s domain, where the job of policing thoughts and ideas critical of or hostile to The Donald, his rule and his cronies falls to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement service,, commonly abbreviated to ICE.

    In a social media post which has since been deleted, ICE included ideas in a list of of targets from which it was keeping Trump’s Grate America safe, according to the Huffington Post.

    ICE enforces 400+ federal laws to ensure public safety and national security. Learn more about our mission: ICE.gov.If it crosses the U.S. border = illegally, its our job to STOP IT. The foregoing text sits on top of a graphic showing what is being stopped - PEOPLE, MONEY, PRODUCTS and IDEAS.

    Ideas thought illegal include any objections and/or criticism of US support for the continuing Israeli genocide in and annexation of the Palestinian territories of the Gaza strip and West Bank.

    But returning to the far-flung reaches of Uncle Sam’s domain referred to above, these also include the confines of the grandly titled Pituffik Space Base, recently the venue for an insult our allies session by the deeply unpleasant JD Vance (posts passim).

    The alleged vice-president’s remarks during his brief three-hour visit did not go down too well with the base commander, Col. Susan Meyers, according to Military.com. In the aftermath of Vance’s brief stopover, Col. Meyers sent a message to all personnel at Pituffik seemingly aimed at generating unity among the airmen and Guardians, as well as the Canadians, Danes and Greenlanders who work there, following Vance’s appearance.

    It is not clear whether Meyers is still serving as commander of the 821st Space Base Group following her email, but the email itself will have come to the attention of the thought police.

  • JD’s worldwide charm offensive continues

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    Back in 1936 an American writer and teacher of courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, corporate training, public speaking and interpersonal skills called Dale Carnegie wrote a self-help book entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People. According to Wikipedia, over 30 million copies of the book have been sold.

    Nevertheless, judging by both their actions and statements – both private and public – it can be safely assumed that none of the senior members of the Trump regime have bought copies, assuming of course they are intelligent enough to read.

    Their playbook seems to be the complete opposite of Carnegie’s goal, i.e. How to Lose Friends and Irritate People.

    Official portrait of the deeply unpleasant JD Vance Kindly step forward with no style at all one James David Vance (born James Donald Bowman. Ed.), inexplicably made vice-president of the United States by the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump.

    As revealed in so-called Signalgate (posts passim), James David, ably assisted by Pete Hegseth, The Felon’s totally unqualified pick for Defence Secretary, who though it perfectly fine to insult European NATO allies. https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/no10-slams-trump-cabinet-attack-on-freeloading-europe_uk_67e26eabe4b06e4e058d2f42, the relevant part of the Signal messaging thread reads as follows:

    Vance said: “If you think we should do it let’s go. I just hate bailing Europe out again.”

    Hegseth then replied three minutes later, saying: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

    For those that don’t know their history, the only time NATO’s Article 5 has been invoked was by the United States after the September 11th attacks. Several of those free-loading European nations contributed to the subsequent US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, putting their troops in harm’s way for Uncle Sam.

    Now James Donald is at it again. This time he’s insulting the Chinese, referring to them as peasants. His words are reported to have been the following:

    We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture. That is not a recipe for economic prosperity. It’s not a recipe for low prices and it’s not a recipe for good jobs in the United States of America.

    In response Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said:

    “It is surprising and sad to hear such ignorant and impolite words from this vice president.

    I’d agree with Mr Lin that it is sad, but not surprising given James Donald’s past remarks in respect of European allies, not to mention his appalling attitude to Greenland and the obsession of his boss therewith.

  • Number Ten reacts to Signalgate

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

    The international political news has been dominated in the last week by what has become known as Signalgate.

    For a few days earlier this month a group of United States national security leaders used insecure communications services and personal devices to conduct a group chat on the Signal messaging service about imminent military operations against the Houthis in Yemen. Among the chat’s members were Vice President JD Vance, top White House staff, three Cabinet secretaries and the directors of two intelligence agencies.

    However, National Security Advisor Mike Waltz erroneously added Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic to the group.

    Discussions in the group included sharing details of planned airstrikes, including types of aircraft and missiles, as well as launch and attack times. Furthermore, Vice-President JD Vance and Defense Secretary used the group to denigrate allegedly freeloading European allies.

    Signalgate has raised concerns inter alia about US national security leaders’ information security practices, what other sensitive information the group might have revealed, whether they were following the Federal Records Act and other related legislation (they were not. Ed.), not to mention accountability within the Trump regime.

    So far the British political establishment has either been silent or said very little about Signalgate with one notable exception. Alleged Labour prime minister ‘Sir’ Keir Starmer might not have approached this matter with an open mouth, but that does not mean that Downing Street has been completely silent: one just has to know where to look to find comment.

    In this case it’s the Mastodon social media network.

    Post reads Txt STOP to opt out of updates on Top Secret US war plans.

    Larry the Downing Street cat is a name not unfamiliar to this blog (posts passim). His latest tongue-in-cheek comment mocks the abject incompetence of the sycophantic MAGA louts the disgraced former 45th president and current disgraceful 47th president of the United States of America, insurrectionist, convicted felon, adjudicated sexual predator, business fraudster, congenital liar and golf cheat commonly known as Donald John Trump.

    By so doing, Larry has done what the appeasing Starmer would never do: openly mock Trump’s extreme right wing regime.

    Keep up the good work, Larry!

  • In your own time, Bristol City Council!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Politics

    Pedestrian crossing controls
    Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
    The best part of 30 years ago,the late cycle campaigner Chris Hutt of Bristol’s Cyclebag remarked that perhaps the simplest way in which mobility within the city could be improved would be to tweak the timings of pedestrian crossings so that they switched over to the pedestrian green phase within seconds of the button being pushed.

    Fifteen years after Chris’ death it looks like something similar to what he suggested is finally being implemented – albeit half-heartedly – by Bristol City Council.

    Today’s Bristol Post reports that around 100 crossings – i.e. a fraction of those in the city – will be changed as suggested by Chris all that time ago.The change has been described by councillors as a “cost-effective way to get traffic-calming measures” that have already proved popular on some busy roads. The setting, known as “pre-timed max”, will also be installed on new crossings as they are provided.

    In addition, the tweak will only be made to stand-alone pedestrian crossings, not those associated with junctions where they are just as badly needed and could be equally as beneficial.

    Commenting on the scheme, Green Councillor Emma Edwards said: “When people realised what had happened, I got phone calls saying ‘can we have one down here and there, and it would be useful here’. Residents really love them and it’s such a cost-effective way to get traffic calming measures in and to help with things like school routes.”

    What has taken you so long, Bristol City Council?

    Your ‘umble scribe’s best guess is that the idea was filed away in the “not invented here” cabinet combined with the propensity of highways department staff not being able to see beyond the bonnet of their respective motorised tinned three-piece suites.

    Given these shortcomings, your correspondent is only prepared to give the council one extremely grudging cheer.

  • Mermaids, volcanism and… Google Translate!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

    Google Translate, the Mountain View behemoth’s translation service is noted for not being very good on technical terminology, even of the most basic kind. Furthermore, it also struggles with a little thin called context, i.e. the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea and in terms of which it can be fully understood.

    When Google Translate gets the context wrong and confuses protecting the public with ancient Greek mythological figures, the result is at the very least amusing and at must alarming and downright dangerous, as revealed by the following social media post by Prof. Jenni Barclay of the University of Bristol.

    Post reads In this case of volcanic eruption, you will hear mermaids. Do not ignore the mermaids; they are there for your safety. Perils of Google Translate No. 44a. People seeking greater warning of volcanic eruption want sirens _not_ mermaids. (Spanish: Sirenas).

    Prof. Barclay’s research is the reduction of risk and prevention of disaster in volcanic settings, with a particular focus both on volcanic processes and the social processes that amplify volcanic risk.

    My question for Prof. Barclay is are mermaids a social process? 😉

    Mis-translations definitely are!

Posts navigation