The shadowy East Bristol Tourist Board has recently been in action, welcoming visitors to Barton Hill, an ancient settlement recorded as Barton [Regis] in the Gloucestershire pages of the 11th century Domesday Book.
Barton itself derives from the old English ‘bere-tun‘ corn farm, outlying grange of barley farm.
From the visit of the Domesday assessors to the present day much has changed. The area still has one church, now St Luke’s, but the two mills mentioned in 1086 have long vanished. However, the area’s changes over the centuries – and those of surrounding districts – are being charted by the Barton Hill History Group.
This cheery message above can be found at the junction of Ducie Road (formerly Pack Horse Lane; there’s a street name that could tell a story. Ed.) with Lawrence Hill.
Have a nice day, y’all! 😀
Update 20/08/17: The cheery welcome message has now been painted over. Does this mean visitors to Barton Hill are no longer welcome? In the immortal words of Private Eye: I think we should be told!
For those interested, the title’s sub-editors, the people that exercised quality control over what was actually published, were all made redundant many years ago. It is now up to the folk who write the copy to check it themselves.
That being so, your correspondent does wonder whether standards of English language teaching have declined in the five and a half decades since he first entered full-time education, or whether the teaching he received was of an exceptional quality.
If you have any thoughts about the quality of media reporting or language teaching, please feel free to comment below.
However, the BBC fails to make mention of the sterling groundwork done by DEFRA civil servants in communicating the pre-visit wisdom of the Minister to the local media. In this context we should be grateful to Belfast freelance journalist Amanda Ferguson for posting the following on her Twitter account.
No, you didn’t misread the above. Gove mentioned Welsh lamb, a product with a protected food name, the implication of this being that he believes this fine product from west of Offa’s Dyke actually comes from even further west from over the Irish Sea.
One has to wonder whether Mr Gove could find his backside with both hands with such a poor grasp of geography. It was evidently not a subject at which he excelled at Aberdeen’s independent Robert Gordon’s Academy, to which he won a scholarship.
For your ‘umble scribe this is yet further proof that the government in Westminster and their sidekicks, the mandarins in Whitehall, care little for anywhere in the country outside the M25 and the metropolitan commuter belt and tend to view the devolved regions of the United Kingdom and the English regions too as little more than colonies of London and therefore ripe for exploitation and patronising treatment.
Yesterday, along with Kurt James, Bristol City Council’s co-ordinator for the Bristol Clean Streets campaign, and local resident Eric Green, I joined a group of volunteers from Tawfiq Mosque in Barton Hill (usually rendered as “Bart Nil” in the local vernacular. Ed.😉 ) for a community litter pick.
Starting at 10.30 in the morning, we split into 6 groups and tackled six different parts of the area for the next 2 hours, picking up litter and noting any larger, fly-tipped items for reporting later.
While picking, we did get passers-by thanking us for our efforts, but ultimately I’m sure all those taking part would prefer it if our fellow citizens didn’t mess the area up in the first place. 😀
It was a successful event and I was most encouraged by the cheerful enthusiasm and commitment of those involved. The photo below shows just some of the stuff we collected.
Some of the litter picked up assembled at the Urban Park collection point.
Your correspondent understands the mosque plans to make this a regular event. If so, I’ll try and get along again to assist.
In the meantime, if you spot a problem on a Bristol street, be it an abandoned vehicle, litter, fly-tipping, a blocked drain or anything else, please report it to the council for attention.
Photo courtesy of Bristol City CouncilLocal ‘superhero’ schoolchildren are the stars of a new publicity campaign to reduce litter in Bristol.
As part of Mayor Marvin Rees’ Clean Streets campaign, children from schools across Bristol have been taking part in litter picks to improve their neighbourhoods and now they’re encouraging all Bristolians to do their bit by not dropping litter in the first place.
Each year Bristol Waste Company collects 3,700 tonnes of litter from the city’s streets, not including rubbish that is fly-tipped or residents’ residual waste. That’s equivalent to the weight of over 290 double-decker buses.
Chesney, one of the children taking part in the campaign, has been helping with the clean-up as he felt sad at seeing litter in the park. “You try to make a difference but then people just litter again, and it’s like a consistent circle.” says Chesney.
Taking inspiration from these youngsters, the council is asking everyone in Bristol to help keep the city clean. The message is simple: Use a bin or take your litter with you.
DRM is the software that comes bolted to your digital media and computerised devices and tries to police your behaviour. The major media companies are its masters, and they justify it as a necessary evil to prevent file sharing.
However, it does more than that and also does worse than that: DRM gives its owners power over our cars, medical devices, phones, computers and more; in addition, it opens a deep crack in our digital rights and freedoms – a crack will only get wider and more dangerous as our societies continue to interweave with technology.
I support the global campaign led by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to raise the awareness of issues related to the so-called Digital Rights Management software. As any other proprietary technology, DRM is killing user freedom of choice and should therefore always be avoided.
As a linguist one of the great developments in the way I work has been the development of online resources in recent years.
These vary from dictionaries to terminological databases and it’s one of the latter that this post is about.
Last week, IATE celebrated its tenth anniversary of being accessible to the public and proudly publicised its entry into double figures.
As can be seen from the screenshot IATE is short for InterActive Terminology for Europe; and it’s a great resource. Searches can be conducted in language pairs from the following languages:
Bulgarian
Czech
Danish
German
Greek
English
Spanish
Finnish
French
Irish
Croatian
Hungarian
Italian
Latin
Lithuanian
Latvian
Maltese
Dutch
Polish
Portuguese
Romanian
Slovak
Slovenian
Swedish
Searches can also be refined by picking specialist subject areas from, for example, accounting to the wood industry.
It’s a particularly good resource for terminology involving the European institutions, political matters and international relations in general, but is also no slouch when it comes to specific terms for, say, forestry.
History & background
IATE is the EU’s inter-institutional terminology database. IATE has been used in the EU institutions and agencies since summer 2004 for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology. The project partners are:
European Commission
European Parliament
Council of Ministers
Court of Justice
Court of Auditors
Economic & Social Committee
Committee of the Regions
European Central Bank
European Investment Bank
Translation Centre for the Bodies of the EU
The project was launched in 1999 with the objective of providing a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources, enhancing the availability and standardisation of the information.
IATE incorporates all of the existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single new, highly interactive and accessible inter-institutional database. Legacy databases from EU institutions have been imported into IATE, which now contains some 1.4 million multilingual entries.
The IATE website is administered by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union in Luxembourg on behalf of the project partners.
Download the database
Having been produced at public expense, the entire database has been opened up to the public can be downloaded, all 1.4 million entries!
The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of (warped) record, hasn’t had and doesn’t have a reputation for accuracy in reporting – a situation which has not improved since it and all the other Local World regional newspaper titles were taken over by Trinity Mirror.
This is more than evident in the title’s reporting of politics today.
The last (New) Labour government had a reputation for authoritarianism and what can best be described as “control-freakery“, so it is no surprise to see the Post assigning the comrades an authoritarian and control freak role amongst today’s headlines.
Mind how you go now! 😉
Furthermore, for the sake of balance and impartiality, the Post also includes some news of the Conservatives, as per the following screenshot.
At this point, a small history lesson might be in order.
The nickname of the Conservative and Unionist Party – to give them their full name – is the Tory Party.
As a piece of English vocabulary, Tory has interesting origins. Etymologically, it’s derived from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, which equates in modern Irish to tóraí and to tòraidh in modern Scottish Gaelic. It has the meaning of outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.
It appears that since the term was coined, the Conservatives’ outlawry has expanded to encompass vandalism and careless driving. 😀
If more classes of crime can be ascribed to the party, please mention them in the comments below.
Update: as of this afternoon, one of these howlers has been corrected by the residents of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. However, the Conservative Party are still responsible on the Post website for robbery and mayhem. 🙂
Yesterday, along with Kurt James, Bristol City Council’s co-ordinator for the Bristol Clean Streets campaign, and local resident Eric Green, I joined a group of volunteers from Tawfiq Mosque in Barton Hill (usually rendered as “Bart Nil” in the local vernacular. Ed.😉 ) for a community litter pick.
Today, Sunday 9th July, is the Day against DRM. 
