English usage | Steve Woods

Enforcement notices – a tale of two cities

04/09/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics

Staying in Glasgow for a few days for my niece’s wedding, your correspondent cannot help comparing and contrasting the differences between how Glasgow and Bristol City Councils set about tackling the public nuisance and environmental crime of fly-tipping, particularly as regards the use of public notices for enforcement and dissuasion.

Exhibit A: the public notices used by Bristol City Council.

This is an A5-sized sign with no redeeming graces, which threatens the maximum possible fine under law of £50,000 (no mention of the alter#native maximum penalty of 6 months’ imprisonment or a combination of the two. Ed.). Should anyone feel public -spirited enough to fancy reporting any fly-tipping, the public is directed to the council’s main switchboard number, with no mention of the very convenient option of reporting fly-tipping online.

Exhibit B: a public notice used by Glasgow City Council, as seen in Holmlea Road.

The initial difference is the size of the notice: at least A4 instead of A5, i.e. twice the size. There’s no mention of any maximum penalty, but residents are encouraged to report Dumb Dumpers via a 24-hour 0845 number. 0845 telephone numbers are “business rate numbers” (otherwise known as “non-geographical premium rate phone numbers“, for which the charge for mobile telephones and landlines is “up to 7p and your phone company’s access charge“. The UKPhoneIfo website warns that “charges for dialling 0845 numbers can be significantly higher – up to 41p per minute” when calling from a mobile number and that “when an 0845 number is called, the call recipient receives a small share of the call cost.” This number is a Scotland-wide number for reporting fly-tipping (there’s also a pan-Scottish Dumb Dumpers reporting website too, Ed.), in addition to which Glasgow City Council website also offers online reporting of fly-tipping and other environmental crimes.

Two more differences to Bristol are apparent: the locations of the council rubbish tips (civic amenity sites) are given in a further attempt to change anti-social behaviour, whilst finally residents are reminded that the state of the neighbourhood is their responsibility, as well as that of the council.

There are lessons that Bristol City Council could learn from Glasgow, as long as it ditches the not invented here attitude that seems to pervade the corridors of the Counts Louse.

One final note: even though the city is still being tidied up following the end of the recent Scottish bin collectors’ strike, your correspondent’s overall impression is that the streets of Glasgow are not as filthy as those of Bristol. Whether this is due to belittling and disparaging those who despoil the urban area as Dumb Dumpers has yet to be proven empirically, but is another tactic BCC could try, if so inclined.
More poor Reach plc quality control

31/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

Genius (or should that be genious? Ed.) headline writing from today’s Daily Post, alias North Wales Live.

Is the entire editorial team asleep at their desks?

Such a glaring spelling mistake and the obvious lack of quality control remind your ‘umble scribe of a Mark Twain quotation regarding a still extant US newspaper, i.e.

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.
Bristol Post/Live exclusive: music venue moonlights as property developer

29/08/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

As a linguist, your ‘umble scribe has, during his working life, always used language as a precision tool. Were using le mot juste can mean the difference between a one-off job or repeat business is confined to linguists is unusual or not, is a matter for conjecture, There are certain other professions where the use of the right vocabulary is vital, particularly in the law and in the field of intellectual property (e.g. trade marks, patents).

It often does not apply in the world of journalism, where a columnist may be taking a deliberately ambiguous angle.

This accuracy of language definitely does not apply to the titles of the Reach plc stable of local news titles, including Bristol’s (news)paper of warped record, the Bristol (Evening) Post and the accompanying Bristol Live website.

As a prime example of this is contained in Thursday’s piece about the redevelopment of Trinity police station.

The headline implies that the as-yet unnamed music venue itself will be building the housing, not some developer who has just realised that, due to the proximity of entertainment, the building bill will now be augmented by the addition of acoustic insulation.

The police station to be demolished and redeveloped just happens to be over the road from the Trinity Centre, with which your correspondent has a long association (posts passim).

What is obvious from perusing the article is that the person(s) writing the headline is/are different from the one who write the article. This seems to be standard practice.

Furthermore, it is also evident that the headline writers do not carefully read what reporters have written, as shown by the latest version of how the story is presented on the paper’s website, with the soon-to-be former cop shop itself transformed a new music venue.

Sacking all those sub-editors a few years ago to save some money has really paid off in terms of the quality of your ‘journalism’, hasn’t it, Reach plc?
Tory leadership – a campaign message

25/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

Other than ‘All hail kakistocracy‘, no further comment required.
Local trees decide it’s autumn

15/08/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

According to the Woodland Trust, “Horse chestnuts, with their mahogany-bright conkers, are the very essence of autumn.

Here in inner city BS5, the local horse chestnut trees in the centre of Lawrence Hill roundabout and on Lawrence Hill itself have decided that autumn has come already, judging by their dry and brown falling leaves and general frowzy appearance.

Horse chestnuts in autumn colours on Lawrence Hill roundabout

Ditto about a hundred metres from the roundabout

The horse chestnut is native to the Pindus Mountains mixed forests and Balkan mixed forests of south east Europe; it was first introduced to the UK from those areas then under the administration of the Ottoman Turks in the late 16th century, being widely planted in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens.

The tree gets its English name of horse chestnut from the scars the leaves leave on the twig when they fall, which resembles an inverted horse shoe with nail holes.

Besides the children’s game of conkers, conkers are also used horse medicines, as additives in shampoos and as a starch substitute. Chemicals extracted from conkers can be used to treat strains and bruises.

Just like the local hawthorns are an indicator of the approach of spring for your ‘umble scribe (posts passim), the these horse chestnuts fulfil a similar role for the approach of autumn. Below is a Woodland Trust video of the life of a horse chestnut throughout the year.
Welsh language payment machine baffles monoglots

14/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

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Rhyl on the North Wales coast attracts many non-Welsh-speaking visitors to its golden sands (your ‘umble scribe was once a regular visitor there as a child since our Sunday school outings all went there. Ed.) and views of the Liverpool Bay wind farms. However, its council-run car parks have pay and display machines set to Welsh as the default language; and this has been frustrating those who cannot read, speak or understand even basic instructions in Welsh, as yesterday’s Nation Cymru reports.

According to the article, “Queues developed as non-Welsh speakers struggled to work out how to pay for their parking at Rhyl’s central underground car park near the promenade, which is administered by Denbighshire County Council.”
Furthermore, the council’s machinery also seemed to have difficulty recognising bank debit cards.

A local with basic Welsh fluency described the experience of one monoglot: “The man stormed off when the machine repeatedly failed to accept his bank card. ‘Why are the instructions only in Welsh. Not many people in Rhyl speak Welsh’.”

A spokesperson for the local authority defended the default Welsh language option, stating:

We would like to remind people that there are two other machines available in the Rhyl Central car park and people can use the pay-by-phone smartphone app with location code 804281 as an alternative way of paying.
Our pay and display machines default to Welsh, but there is a large grey “language button” that people can press to change the language. This is explained on the machines.

Perhaps grey is not a suitable colour for the language button; perhaps the council need to change this to red and white in the style of the English flag or red, white and blue in the style of the Bloody Butcher’s Apron (which some still call the Union Jack or Union flag. Ed.). 😀

Update 15/08/22: Monday’s Nation Cymru has yet another story on the inability of users to operate a second parking machine ‘in bloody Welsh’, this time from the other end of the country, Caswell Bay, on the Gower peninsula near Swansea.
The living dead

13/08/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

While the interminable Conservative Party leadership contest between the 2 tenth-rate rivals, one Mary Elizabeth Truss and rich boy Rishi Sunak, draws tediously on, with government administration seeming to have almost ceased despite drought, rampant inflation, surging energy prices (with the promise of higher prices to come. Ed.) and the outgoing party-time alleged prime minister Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is hardly anywhere to be seen, not even for a photo opportunity as he dives into the dressing-up box to indulge his inner Mr Benn, a new phrase has been coined – zombie government.

A still from the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead

As Wikipedia states: “A zombie (Haitian French: zombi, Haitian Creole: zonbi) is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.” The English word zombie was first recorded in 1819, in a history of Brazil by the romantic poet Robert Southey, in the form of zombi. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word’s origin as West African and compares it to the Kongo words nzambi (god) and zumbi or nzumbi (fetish).

Comparing Conservative Party ministers to reanimated corpses is disingenuous, as the latter have far more compassion.

All the crises mentioned in the first paragraph all seem to be coming to a head and combining during what is traditionally known in Britain as the silly season, which occurs during the long parliamentary summer recess, when, having no – or very little – politics to report, the newspapers and other media resort to more frivolous and lightweight items of ‘news‘.
However, all is not yet lost.

Yesterday the Metro reported that the notoriously work-shy Johnson (remember those missed COBRA meetings at the start of the pandemic? Ed.) had actually managed to turn up for a meeting, although the outcomes of the meeting stated to accompany the headline hardly seem to have made the gathering worth the effort of organising and attending.

And to think all this will continue until after the closure of the leadership poll for the 160,000 or so Tory Party members at 5pm on Friday 2nd September…
The most illiterate petrol station in North Wales

31/07/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

Today’s Daily Post has a story – and accompanying video – about the efforts to make Plas Acton Garage in Wrexham the cheapest in North Wales.

Amongst the ideas implemented by the owners to keep prices down, the article states:

Regular customers can get their hands on “no strings attached” discount cards that strike a penny off every litre on the pump price indefinitely. In essence, if you topped up with roughly 50 litres of fuel you’d save 50p.

However, the owners are not offering one penny off the pump price, but ‘one pence‘, as evidenced by the voucher being held up in the video still used for the Daily Post piece.

If not the cheapest petrol station in North Wales, the wording on the voucher definitely makes it the region’s most illiterate petrol station.

The proprietors are not the first to be unaware that the singular of pence is penny. The most egregious misuse of one pence for one penny occurred at the Despatch Box in the Chamber of the House of Commons (where else? Ed.). The date was 20th March 2013, the occasion was the annual budget speech by the Chancellor of the Exchequer – one George Gideon Oliver Osborne, then aged 41 and three-quarters, who was very badly (and expensively) educated at St Paul’s School and Magdalen College, Oxford 😀 (posts passim).
Dorries goes to war – again and again and…

24/06/2022 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media, Tech

In the beginning was World War One (1914-18), then World War 2 (1939-45).

There have been various conflicts since 1945, but none has qualified being counted as a World War (note capitalisation) and their number has remained stuck firmly on two.

Until today.

Step forward one Nadine Vanessa Dorries, inexplicably elevated way beyond her subterranean ignorance threshold to serve as Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, concerning whose appointment former Tory Party chairman Chris Patten is on record as saying: “And nobody should ever see the words ‘Nadine Dorries’ and ‘culture secretary’ in the same sentence”.

Following yesterday’s humiliating by-election defeats in Tiverton & Honiton and Wakefield, Nadine fearlessly took to social media as cheerleader in chief for the Cult of the Boris, tweeting the following.

World War 11?

That’s nine more than are acknowledged by the generally accepted historical record.

Whether Nadine was tweeting under the influence of digital dyslexia, innumeracy or something psychoactive has yet to come to light, but remember that part of Nadine’s brief is matters digital and the above tweet shows she cannot even use a mobile phone app – an iPhone Twitter client – competently, which bodes ill for this country.
BS5 bees

15/06/2022 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

Bees are found on every continent except Antarctica; and they’re crucial to life on this planet since they pollinate nearly 75% of the world’s plants, which in turn produce 90% of the food consumed by humanity. Without the aid of bees plant pollination would not occur so easily, plants would die and humans and many other species of life would die out.
Generally one only notices bees in the inner city in ones and twos. However, bees establish new colonies by swarms consisting of a queen and legions of workers (her daughters). On Monday your ‘umble scribe spotted this swarm in Chaplin Road in Bristol’s inner city.

Somewhere in the seething mass is the queen

A neighbour informed me that a beekeeper was supposed to have turned up the previous evening to deal with them. S/he had evidently paid a visit by beer o’clock when your correspondent ventured forth for a pint.

Note the two hive frames inside the box taped to the railings

The bees have entered the box with the hive frames, presumably after the queen was first located and transferred to the box by the beekeeper.

Bees have long been renowned for their industry. In Old English (aka Anglo-Saxon Ed.) the eponymous hero of Beowulf has beo (i.e. bee) as the first syllable of his name; when coupled with wulf (i.e wolf, predator), this implies Beowulf was a very busy and ultimately successful hunter. In medieval times, bees themselves were regarded as a potent symbol of chastity in Christianity, whilst in Islam, honey was believed to have spiritual and physical healing powers. These religious and cultural beliefs encouraged beekeeping on a vast scale among landowners and peasants alike.
Coming up to the 18th century, the English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake wrote the following of bees in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell“:
The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

And finally on busy bees, from the 18th to the 20th century and the late Arthur Askey.

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