English usage | Steve Woods

Proofreader, what proofreader?

18/08/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

Evidence that accuracy is not a priority at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth abounds every day in the online edition of the Bristol Post.

Below is a screenshot of the most egregious example of a lack of quality control in what passes for today’s local news since the title’s takeover by the quality-unconscious Trinity Mirror plc.

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.
Ambiguity

18/07/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Tech

Throughout my professional life, writing so that one’s meaning is clear and there is no room for misinterpretation has been of paramount importance.

However, writing without ambiguity is a skill that’s evidently bypassed those who currently write the news headlines for Yahoo’s UK website…

Enquiries are continuing as to how the cops came to be in the woman’s pyjamas in the first place. 😀
Tidy Barton Hill

16/07/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics

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.
Post politics

03/07/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Politics

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. 🙂
Lincoln Blue

02/06/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics, Social Media

There are 6 days to go until the polls open for Theresa May’s snap election that she wasn’t going to call and the war of words is really hotting up.

This blog has previously drawn attention to Theresa May’s description of the Conservatives as the “Nasty Party” (posts passim) and how under her premiership, she and her members have striven to be as nasty as they can.

This has continued with increasing fury during the election campaign and has intensified as the Tories’ lead in the opinion polls has narrowed, as shown by this series of tweets by the party’s faithful in Grantham, birthplace of the grocer’s daughter who went on to become the Conservatives’ revered Leaderene (once known as the “Milk Snatcher”. Ed.).

In that series of postings, Lincolnshire Tories have been faithfully parroting the bile the party has been encouraging their allies in the right-wing mainstream media since their return to government in 2010.

Note too, the spelling error in the final tweet: “rouges” instead of “rogues“. It must be an orthographical error as I can conceive of no predictive text application that would come up with such a substitute.

Any rouge, otherwise known these days as blusher, is a cosmetic product and thus quite appropriate to this load of made-up nonsense. 🙂

Since the posting of those tweets, the account has been suspended by Twitter, most likely for abusive tweets and/or behaviour.
Mumblin’ Harry Wales

25/05/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

Who’s he?

Some obscure blues artist?

Not quite.

Read on.

Germany’s federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has decided to cut out part of an English exam including a speech by a a member of Britain’s so-called royal family after thousands of students complained that they could not understand him, The Local reports.

On Tuesday North Rhine Westphalia’s school ministry announced it would be discarding part of a final English exam for 100,000 16 year-olds which involved their listening to a speech by young ‘Arry and then answering questions on it.

More than 45,000 examination candidates signed a petition after the test last week calling for a retake because of Mr Wales’ “mumbly” enunciation and the recording’s poor quality.

Regional teachers’ organisation Lehrer NRW commented that even mother tongue English teachers struggled to understand what he was saying.

There were also complaints about poor vocabulary preparation for other parts of the examination.

In response to the controversy, the NRW education ministry explained that markers would be given more leeway in assessing other areas of the test to account for what was taught in class.

In a press release (German), Lehrer NRW said that what was being proposed was a “fair solution“.
Election special: Corbyn crosses the floor

21/05/2017 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Politics

[Update at end]

There’s a phrase in English politics – crossing the floor. The floor is that of the House of Commons and it means that an elected MP has switched allegiance from one party to another.

One former MP – Sir Hartley Shawcross – was rumoured to be constantly on the point of changing allegiance throughout the early and mid-1950s and was consequently nicknamed Sir Shortly Floorcross. 😀

It is a practice normally indulged in by rank and file MPs, not party leaders, unless Bristol’s newspaper of (warped) record is to be believed as per the following screenshot.

A proper Red Tory?

Yes, your eyes are not deceiving you. According to the Bristol Post, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has joined the Conservatives just 3 weeks away from a general election.

Your correspondent is now awaiting confirmation of this report from other mainstream media outlets.

Update: 14.00 hrs, 21st May – The header over the link has now been changed to read “Politics”. However, use of a special creative writing technique would have avoided the original gaffe. Its name: proofreading! 😀
Election special: Tory buzzword bingo

03/05/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

Cricket fans have long been acquainted with the delights of Boycott Bingo (posts passim), where the regular verbal mannerisms on Test Match Special of the greatest living Yorkshireman have been turned into a game.

Following the recent announcement of the snap general election next month, followers of politics can now play their own game of buzzword bingo with the stock phrases and soundbites of the nation’s political leaders and election candidates.

Expect these buzzwords to be wheeled out until everyone is absolutely fed up with them, usually after about 48 hours.

The Conservatives’ soundbites are particularly limited in scope and number and, from what I’ve seen and heard, to call their candidates’ and leader’s performance wooden would be an insult to trees.

Below, courtesy of The Guardian, is your very own buzzword bingo card for use with Tory leader Theresa May (whose main method of operation seems to consist of avoiding saying anything of substance. Ed.) and her colleagues.

Good luck!
Still verminous

26/04/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

At the Conservative Party conference in 2002, new party chairwoman Theresa May stunned delegates with her keynote speech by saying the following:

Yes, we’ve made progress, but let’s not kid ourselves. There’s a way to go before we can return to government. There’s a lot we need to do in this party of ours. Our base is too narrow and so, occasionally, are our sympathies, You know what some people call us: the nasty party.

Since 2010 the Conservatives have proved in government that they haven’t changed and they’re still the Nasty Party writ large with their austerity policies that have cut funding to local authorities, cutting benefits for the disabled and referring to the unemployed as scroungers and shirkers.

Theresa May has since moved on from Conservative Party chairwoman via the Home Office to doing Prime Minister impressions at a lectern outside 10 Downing Street and at the despatch box in the House of Commons. Although her 2002 admonishment might have been the first time that a prominent Tory had criticised the party, the Tories’ political opponents have been doing so along the same lines for decades.

One of the most prominent of these criticisms in the post-war period came on 4th July 1948 when Aneurin Bevan, then the Labour government’s Minister of Health, addressed a Labour Party rally in Manchester on the anniversary of Labour’s accession to power.

Bevan’s speech was largely a review, followed by a pledge that the Government could carry out its entire programme, including nationalisation of the steel industry, a pledge in the party’s 1945 election manifesto.

However, Bevan recalled what he described as the bitter experiences of his early life. For a time he was forced to live on the earnings of an elder sister and was told to emigrate.

On this point, he remarked:

That is why no amount of cajolery, and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party that inflicted those bitter experiences on me. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation.

Yes, that’s right. In Bevan’s eyes, the Conservatives were “lower than vermin“.

Oxford Dictionaries defines vermin as follows:

Wild animals which are believed to be harmful to crops, farm animals, or game, or which carry disease, e.g. rodents.

It also offers the additional sub-definition below:

People perceived as despicable and as causing problems for the rest of society.

As regards its origin, the word vermin first appears in Middle English and comes from from Old French based on Latin vermis ‘worm’ since it originally denoted animals such as reptiles and snakes.

However, this demotion of the Tories to rank below rats, mice and the like wasn’t the only attack on the Conservatives during Bevan’s speech, since he is also reported as asking the meeting rhetorically at one point: “For what is Toryism, except organised spivvery?“. This reference to wartime black marketeers may sound anachronistic, but there are still senior members of the Conservative Party who are even nowadays referred to as spivs (posts passim) – and by others apart from your ‘umble scribe.

Finally, in view of the impending general election, it might be worth recalling what Bevan went on the say about the Conservatives of his time, since these words still have relevance and pertinence today.

Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. But, I warn you young men and women, do not listen to what they are saying now. Do not listen to the seductions of Lord Woolton. He is a very good salesman. If you are selling shoddy stuff you have to be a good salesman. But I warn you they have not changed, or if they have they are slightly worse than they were.

Ouch! All that needs changing to make the above quotation contemporary to the 2017 election would be to replace the name of Woolton with that of a present-day prominent right-wing Tory grandee. Will any opposition candidate do so?
British press puts truth in intensive care

24/04/2017 Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

In 1918 US Senator Hiram Warren Johnson is purported to have said: “The first casualty when war comes is truth.”

There may not be a war, but classifying the status of truth as a mere casualty may be insufficient and it now finds itself on life support in intensive care when the predominantly right-wing British press is reporting politics, particularly politics abroad.

Yesterday saw France go to the polls in the first round of the 2017 presidential election, with 11 candidates standing.

Under the French system, the 2 front runners in the first round of the election go forward to a straight winner takes all ballot in the second round.

In yesterday’s ballot the independent candidate Emmanuel Macron polled around 23.7% of vote with Marine Le Pen, leader of the fascist Front National coming in second on roughly 21.5%.

Early opinion polls also give Macron a lead of over 20 percentage points over Le Pen with regard to second round voting intentions and he’s currently predicted to garner 60% of second round votes, thus excluding Le Pen from the Elysée Palace.

However, looking at certain sections of the British press, anyone would think right-wing intolerance had triumphed in this first round.

Here’s The Times, formerly regarded as Britain’s newspaper of record, now reduced to a sad mouthpiece parroting the extreme right-wing agenda of the deeply unpleasant Rupert Murdoch.

Note the large photograph of Marine Le Pen. It’s also worth noting that despite the hype from right-wing media around the world, a $9.8m loan to the FN from a Russian bank with Kremlin links and alleged Russian social media support, Le Pen polled little better than in the 2012 presidential election when she finished third with nearly 18% of the vote.

However, The Times was not alone in its stilted coverage. Here’s the Daily Mail’s front page.

All that can be said is that editor Paul Dacre has presided over misinformation and distortion on a massive scale, but then again the Mail has decades of experience in promoting fascism dating right back to the 1930s and its founder Viscount Rothermere’s infamous “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” piece.

Comme on dit en France, plus ça change…

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